February 14, 1946, 80 years ago: The 1st programmable, electronic, general-purpose digital computer goes online.
It is the Electronic Numerical Integrator And Computer, or ENIAC. It was built and operated by the University of Pennsylvania, at their Department of Computer and Information Science, at 3330 Walnut Street, in the University City section of West Philadelphia, just around the corner from Penn's basketball arena, The Palestra, and its football stadium, Franklin Field. The original building has been replaced by a new one, hosting Penn's School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. A historical marker denoting ENIAC is outside.
ENIAC cost $487,000 to build, or about $8.74 million today. It was 100 feet long, nearly 8 feet high, and nearly 3 feet deep, and contained 17,468 vacuum tubes. (The invention of the transistor was nearly 2 years away, 85 miles to the northeast in Berkeley Heights, New Jersey.) It was said to be able to make a calculation in 30 seconds that took a human being 20 hours.
As with so many other useful things, ENIAC's primary purpose was for use in warfare. It was designed to calculate artillery firing tables for the U.S. Army's Ballistic Research Laboratory. But its 1st program was a study of the feasibility of a thermonuclear weapon -- which, 3 years later, was successfully tested: The hydrogen bomb, or H-bomb.
In July 1946, Penn handed ENIAC over to the Army Ordnance Corps. On July 29, 1947, it was put into operation at the Aberdeen Proving Ground outside Aberdeen, Maryland. It remained in continuous use until October 2, 1955.
It was disassembled, and parts of it are on public display at several locations, including, among others, Penn, Aberdeen, the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, the U.S. Military Academy in West Point, New York, and the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California.
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