ENIAC computer

Another universal trend is the tendency for systems to evolve from the macro to the nano scale. We see this trend in action when looking at the first early computers, which weighed about 27 tons and contained 17,468 vacuum tubes, 70,000 resistors, 10,000 capacitors, and around 5 million hand-soldered joints. IBM s ENIAC computer measured 8.5 feet by 3 feet by 80 feet. By comparison, today s notebook computers are quite small. 

The ENIAC computer, built in 1947, weighed more than 30 tons used 19,000 vacuum tubes, 1,500 relays, about one-half-million resistors, capacitors, and inductors and consumed almost 200 kilowatts of electricity per hour. 

In 1997, the ENIAC computer was reproduced on a single triple-layer CMOS chip that was 7.44 millimeters (mm) X 5.29 mm in size and contained 174,569 transistors. 

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. 

Faster computers with bigger memory capabilities and smaller size and energy consumption are a must for further technological development. More complicated tasks can be handled with computer speed and memories doubling every 3 years and an increase in computers efficiency being accompanied by the shrinking of their sizes. One of the first electronic computers ENIAC occupied several rooms and weighted 30 tons [51], its counterparts in the seventies were of the size of a wardrobe while todays palmtops are more efficient than mainframes of the 1980-ties. However, this miniaturization process cannot... 

ENIAC- Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer was built for American Army by J. P. Eckert and J. W. Mauchley at the Pennsylvania State University in 1946. It weighed about 30 tons, consisted of 18 thousand vacuum lamps and semiconducting diodes. - Gazeta Wyborcza, 18 marca 2000, Supermaket p. 3. 

ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer). The first electronic dig-... 

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. 

Second, the vacuum tubes were very bulky. Computers like the first computer, ENIAC, often took up enough cabinets to fill an entire floor of a building, with the computer in one room and the air conditioning equipment in the one next to it. 

The very concept of a stored program computer had its roots in the work done during World War II on a computing machine called the ENIAC. At the start of World War II, the military felt a need for more and better trajectory tables for artillery. To prepare the tables, the Ballistic Research Laboratory of the U.S. Army Ordnance Department utilized a pair of mechanical differential analyzers. But by 1943 the produaion of ballistic tables was so far behind schedule that the Ordnance Department began to look for another means of preparing the tables. The answer came in April 1943, when a delegation from... 

In January 1944, Eckert and Mauchly began to consider the problem of creating for future machines a device that could store and quickly access a sequence of instructions. Discussions were held at the ENIAC project on a new machine, eventually called the ED VAC (Elearonic Discrete Variable Arithmetic Computer), which would be capable of storing its instruction tape internally within its memory and issuing instructions at electronic speeds. In October 1944, the Army Ordnance Department granted the Moore School 100,000 to be added to the budget of the ENIAC project to begin research and development work on the EDVAC. ... 

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. 

It is easy to imagine with this background how von Neumann, keenly aware of both the limited computational resources available and the scope of the mathematical physics problems to be solved at Los Alamos, was affected by Goldstine s disclosure. Shortly after their fortuitous encounter he visited Philadelphia to view the ENIAC, then under construction, and to talk with the ENIAC group including J. G. Brainerd, project supervisor J. Presper Eckert, Jr., chief engineer John W. Mauchly, and Arthur W. Burks. 

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