ENIAC calculator

FIGURE 8.1 The Electronic Numerical Integrator and Calculator (ENIAC) and its inventor, J. Presper Eekert, circa 1946. ENIAC was the world s first electronic computer. Courtesy, UNISYS Corporation. 

Additional References A) Anon, "Electronic Calculator Eniac , SciAmer 174, 248(June 1946) B) A.S. Householder, ed, "Monte Carlo Method , Applied Mathematics Series No 12, USNatlBurStds, GovtPrtgOff, Washington, DC... 

Digital computers were first built at Harvard University (Aiken s53 Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator, Mark I, 1939-1944) and at the University of Pennsylvania by Eckert54 and Mauchly55 (Electronic Numerical Integrator and Calculator, ENIAC, 1946) they used vacuum tubes instead of the cumbersome and slow mechanical switches. ENIAC morphed into an Eckert-Mauchly design of BINAC, which was sold to Remington Rand and became Univac I. 

Transistors have had an immense impact on the technology of electronic devices for which signal amplification is needed, such as communications equipment and computers. Before the invention of the transistor at Bell Laboratories in 1947, amplification was provided exclusively by vacuum tubes, which were both bulky and unreliable. The first electronic digital computer, ENIAC, built at the University of Pennsylvania, had 19,000 vacuum tubes and consumed 150,000 W of electricity. Because of the discovery and development of the transistor and the printed circuit, a hand-held calculator run by a small battery has the same computing power as ENIAC. 

If and when a Josephson junction computer is built, the junction s size and low power dissipation would allow manufacturers to put more guts and gas into their machines. Their cycle times—the time required for a chip to perform one task—would be substantially shortened. Such a computer might, in fact, fill a cube only 2 inches on a side and operate more than fifty times faster than the best that are available today. No mean feat, considering that the world s first all-electronic computer, ENIAC (for Electronic Numerical Integrator and Calculator), covered some 1,500 square feet of floor space at the University of Pennsylvania, where it had its maiden run in 1946, was jam-packed with some twenty thousand vacuum tubes, and weighed in at more than 30 tons. Moreover, its computations were measured in seconds—not a nanosecond, a picosecond (a trillionth of a second), or a femtosecond (a quadrillionth of a second), the measurements computer designers are accustomed to shooting for today. 

Research Laboratory, where, along with the ENIAC, it was applied to calculations related to ballistic trajectories and other military problems. ... 

The first electronic computer ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator and Calculator) developed in 1946 at the University of Pennsylvania had about 18,000 thermionic valves and consumed about 150 kW of electrical power. It was a huge machine weighing over 25,000 kg and filled a room. Initially, it was used for calculating artillery firing tables for the US Army s Ballistic Research Laboratory. 

After the war the ENIAC group dispersed in November of 1945 von Neumann was named Director of an Electronic Computer Project at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton. The purpose of this project in the words of its Director was to develop and construct a fully automatic, digital, all-purpose electronic calculating machine... which if intelligently used, will completely revolutionize our computing techniques, or to formulate it more broadly, the field of approximation mathematics (/5). Following the ENIAC dedication the next February, Goldstine and Burks joined the IAS Project. Eckert and Mauchly subsequently left the Moore School to establish their own company, the Electronic Control Company, which later became the Eckert Mauchly Computer Corporation and, ultimately, the UNIVAC division of Sperry Rand. 

The first Monte Carlo calculations were performed on the Eniac by a group of people from Los Alamos, led by N. C. Metropolis. Those calculations were rather primitive, compared with what can be done on today s computing machines but, in one way, they were about as sophisticated as any ever performed, in that they simulated complete chain reactions in critical and supercritical systems, starting with an assumed neutron distribution, in space and velocity, at an initial instant of time and then following all details of the reaction as it develops subsequently. 

In the 1940 s, British intelligence created the first computer, Colossus. After World War II, the British destroyed Colossus. Two Americans at the University of Pennsylvania are credited with creating the first American computer in 1945. It was named the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Calculator (ENIAC). It was able to easily decrypt manual and Enigma ciphers. 

Atanasoff/Berry Computer built in the early 1940s at Iowa State University, or J. Prosper Eckert and John Mauchly for their ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator and Calculator) built in the mid-1940s at the Moore School of the University of Pennsylvania, because Mauchly had briefly visited Atanasoff before he built the ENIAC. Its basic principles were enunciated in a memorandum written by von Neumann in 1945 and, largely because of this widely circulated report, von Neumann s name alone has come to be associated with concept of the stored-program computer. 

Whereas much of the UK-based wartime work was kept secret, work progressed in the USA in parallel with the UK work, and in a more open fashion. Electronic numerical integrator and calculator (ENIAC) was conceived and designed by John Mauchly (1907-1980) and John Adam Prosper Pres Eckert (1919-1995), following a 1942 memo from Mauchly proposing a general-purpose electronic computer. A contract was received from the US Army in 1943, and the completed machine was announced to the pubhc in Eebruary 1946. It used some 17,000 thermionic valves and weighed about 27 tonnes. Vacuum tube failure rate was such that its availability was only about fifty percent. Input was via an IBM card reader. 

The most widespread manifestation of electronics has been in personal computers and calculators. Although mechanical calculating machines have been available for hundreds of years, and ENIAC (electronic numerical integrator and computer) was built using over 19,000 vacuum tubes, it was not until the advent of low-cost electronics that computers became feasible for widespread use. Since that time, they have become ubiquitous, not only as stand-alone products, but also incorporated into products ranging from automobiles to military weapons. 

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