 Four ENIAC panels and one of its three function tables at the School of Engineering and Applied Science at the University of Pennsylvania | |
| Location | University of Pennsylvania Department of Computer and Information Science, 3330 Walnut Street, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, U.S. |
|---|---|
| Coordinates | 39°57′08″N 75°11′26″W / 39.9523°N 75.1906°W |
| Built/founded | 1945 |
| PHMC dedicated | Thursday, June 15, 2000 |
ENIAC (/ˈɛniæk/; Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer)[1][2] was the first programmable, electronic, general-purpose digital computer, completed in 1945.[3][4] Other computers had some of these features, but ENIAC was the first to have them all. It was Turing-complete and able to solve "a large class of numerical problems" through reprogramming.[5][6]
ENIAC was designed by John Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert to calculate artillery firing tables for the United States Army's Ballistic Research Laboratory (which later became a part of the Army Research Laboratory).[7][8] However, its first program was a study of the feasibility of the thermonuclear weapon.[9][10]
ENIAC was completed in 1945 and first put to work for practical purposes on December 10, 1945.[11]
ENIAC was formally dedicated at the University of Pennsylvania on February 15, 1946, having cost $487,000 (equivalent to $6,900,000 in 2023), and called a "Giant Brain" by the press.[12] It had a speed on the order of one thousand times faster than that of electro-mechanical machines.[13]
ENIAC was formally accepted by the U.S. Army Ordnance Corps in July 1946. It was transferred to Aberdeen Proving Ground in Aberdeen, Maryland in 1947, where it was in continuous operation until 1955.
The 1948 Manchester Baby was the first machine to contain all the elements essential to a modern electronic digital computer, as it could be reprogrammed electronically to hold stored programs instead of requiring setting of switches to program as ENIAC did.
- ^ Eckert Jr., John Presper and Mauchly, John W.; Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer, United States Patent Office, US Patent 3,120,606, filed 1947-06-26, issued 1964-02-04; invalidated 1973-10-19 after court ruling in Honeywell v. Sperry Rand.
- ^ Weik, Martin H. "The ENIAC Story". Ordnance (January–February 1961). Washington, DC: American Ordnance Association. Archived from the original on August 14, 2011. Retrieved March 29, 2015.
- ^ "3.2 First Generation Electronic Computers (1937-1953)". www.phy.ornl.gov. Archived from the original on March 8, 2012.
- ^ "ENIAC on Trial – 1. Public Use". www.ushistory.org. Search for 1945. Archived from the original on February 9, 2019. Retrieved May 16, 2018.
The ENIAC machine [...] was reduced to practice no later than the date of commencement of the use of the machine for the Los Alamos calculations, December 10, 1945.
- ^ Goldstine & Goldstine 1946, p. 97
- ^ Shurkin, Joel (1996). Engines of the mind: the evolution of the computer from mainframes to microprocessors. New York: Norton. ISBN 978-0-393-31471-7.
- ^ Moye, William T. (January 1996). "ENIAC: The Army-Sponsored Revolution". US Army Research Laboratory. Archived from the original on May 21, 2017. Retrieved March 29, 2015.
- ^ Goldstine 1993, p. 214.
- ^ Rhodes 1995, p. 251, chapter 13: The first problem assigned to the first working electronic digital computer in the world was the hydrogen bomb. […] The ENIAC ran a first rough version of the thermonuclear calculations for six weeks in December 1945 and January 1946.
- ^ McCartney 1999, p. 103: "ENIAC correctly showed that Teller's scheme would not work, but the results led Teller and Ulam to come up with another design together."
- ^ *"ENIAC on Trial – 1. Public Use". www.ushistory.org. Search for 1945. Retrieved May 16, 2018.
The ENIAC machine […] was reduced to practice no later than the date of commencement of the use of the machine for the Los Alamos calculations, December 10, 1945.
- ^ "'ENIAC': Creating a Giant Brain, and Not Getting Credit". The New York Times.
- ^ "ENIAC USA 1946". The History of Computing Project. History of Computing Foundation. March 13, 2013. Archived from the original on January 4, 2021.