ENIAC and the Beginning of Modern Comptuers
ENIAC, Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer, began its production in July of 1945 at the University of Pennsylvania’s Moore School of Electrical Engineering with a contract of $61,700, approximately $800,000 today. It was finished later that year and was publicly announced on February 14th, 1946. The final production cost was much more than the original budget, around $500,000 or $6,300,000 today.
Modern computers are hard to compare to the achievement of creating the first electronic computer. Most “computers” before ENIAC were mechanical and solved simple problems. ENIAC was 2400 times as fast as a human and was primarily used by the United States military to calculate artillery trajectory. The actual calculations were done on 20 accumulators, with 10 digits held on a ring, each changed by 36 vacuum tubes. Each accumulator could perform 5000 additions or subtractions per second, but 4 were used to calculate up to 385 multiplications per second and 5 to compute 40 divisions or 3 square roots per second. The vacuum tubes used were so susceptible to overheating that in its early production, ENIAC was off more than on because multiple tubes had to be changed each day and finding the tube that had broken was not a simple task. Eventually the programmers could find the specific tube that had failed by running the program and finding where it failed. They then told a technician to replace that tube. This process took about 15 and improvements to the cooling system allowed for only 1 tube about every two days to fail. The longest time without a shutdown was 116 hours, close to 5 days. There was a set number of computations that ENIAC could accomplish. Adding new calculations was possible but took around 2 weeks to complete. Even the size is hard to comprehend fully today. The entire computer took up around 1800 sqft, weighed 27 tons and had close to 5 million had soldered joints. Although ENIAC’s primary use was artillery calculations, the first full test of it’s performance was used to help simulate the first atomic bomb and required 1,000,000 hand punched cards. Initial use of ENIAC was difficult and required constant maintenance. On November 9th, 1946, ENIAC was taken down to upgrade memory storage, once again in 1948, and then ran until October 2nd, 1955 when it was officially shut down.
At the time of early electronic computers, women were often given the roles of programming, although they were rarely not credited for their work or seen as an integral part of the process. Kay Mcnulty, Betty Jennings, Betty Snyder, Marlyn Wescoff, Fran Bilas, Ruth Lichterman are the 6 primary programmers during its production. None of them were given credit for their work during their lifetime and were not even invited to the announcement or the celebratory dinner afterwards. For most of the time following its release, they were referred to ENIAC’s refrigerator ladies because people thought that they were models, like they had for refrigerators at the time, to promote the announcement.
In 1996, the University of Pennsylvania held a convention called ENIAC-on-a-chip to commemorate the work done 50 years before. The goal was to recreate the full functionality of ENIAC with modern technology. The advancements in those 50 years can not compare to the supercomputers of today. For example, ENIAC could perform 5000 calculations per second, while the human brain has a capacity of 1 exaFLOP, or 1 billion billion calculations per second. The fastest super-computer to date is the Sunway Taihulight, which even at its fastest, only can reach 1/8th the speed of a human brain at around 125 petaFLOPs.
