Eniac, the First General-Purpose Digital Computer, Turns 80

rvz

Unfortunately, if the subject doesn't have "AI", no one cares.

gerikson

> The computer contained about 18,000 vacuum tubes, which were cooled by 80 air blowers. More than 30 meters long, it filled a 9 m by 15 m room and weighed about 30 kilograms. It consumed as much electricity as a small town. Surprisingly light though...

Rochus

Eniac was indeed impressive and an important milestone. I recommend the 1999 book "ENIAC - The triumphs and tragedies of the world's first computer" by Scott McCartney which is both interesting to read and very informative. Also the review of the book by the late Jean Bartik, one of the "computers" and thus an eyewitnmess, is very interesting: https://web.archive.org/web/20221101120020/https://www.amazo... . Though the article is very US focussed, keeping quiet that German engineer Konrad Zuse completed the Z3 in May 1941, five years before ENIAC, effectively creating the world's first working programmable and fully automatic digital computer. While ENIAC required days of manual cable patching to program, the Z3 was quickly programmed by a punched tape ("Lochstreifen"), and Zuse also has invented Plankalkül between 1942 and 1945, which is widely recognized as the world's first high-level programming language. The cooperation between Zuse and ETH Zurich eventually led to the first self-compiling compiler and eventually Algol 60 (see "The European Side of the Last Phase of the Development of ALGOL 60" by Peter Naur in ACM SIGPLAN "History of Programming Languages" from 1978). And there was also the British Colossus, which was also a "programmable computer" and successfully utilized vacuum tubes for code-breaking by early 1944.

klelatti

ENIAC was very important but this article overstates its significance and ignores other (non US) machines to the point of historical inaccuracy. No mention of Z3 or Manchester Baby for example, the latter based on the von Neumann paper for example, was arguably a more accurate pointer towards how computer architecture would develop.

adrian_b

The shortened title is very incorrect. What the article says is different: "the first large-scale, general-purpose, programmable electronic digital computer". The claim of the article can be considered correct, and "electronic" is a part that cannot be deleted from it without falsifying the claim. Before ENIAC, there have been digital computers that were much more general-purpose, because they run programs written on punched tape, instead of requiring a rewiring like ENIAC. ENIAC, which evolved from the analog computers known as differential analyzers, had a structure closer to an FPGA than to a modern digital computer. In contrast, an earlier relay computer like Harvard Mark I was intended as a successor of the mechanical digital computer designed by Charles Babbage, so it already had the same structure with a modern digital computer, except that it used different kind of memories for data and for programs, hence the name "Harvard architecture". The same was true for the Zuse computer. The earlier ABC digital computer was electronic, but it can be considered as special-purpose, not general-purpose. The first relay computers at Bell Labs may also be considered as special purpose.

froh

Zuse Z3 enters the room, relais' kindly rattling "Hrm. I was digital. not electronic as in cathode tubes but definitively digital."

josefritzishere

One of the engineers who worked on the Eniac lived next door to my old landlord in New Jersey. They played chess in the back yard. He was reputedly quite good.

ux266478

For the curious programmers who are wondering what it was like to program ENIAC, a simulator is available: https://www.cs.drexel.edu/~bls96/eniac/simulator.html And a programming manual: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=846... It's really got a nice archaic character.

soyyo

I find it interesting that, unless I’m mistaken, this was a completely engineering effort. That is, they were not trying to follow the notion of a universal computing device that had already been defined by Turing and Church at the time. They were just trying to build something like a huge programmable calculator, but they ended up building a universal computation device anyway.

bpoyner

Reminds me of stumbling across the Harvard Mark I, which is about 1-2 years older, while wandering through the Harvard Science Center (as one does). By far the oldest computer I've seen in person. Seems they moved it since then to the Science and Engineering Complex.

llimllib

My alma mater, Ursinus, is a very small school and has few claims to fame; but one of them is that John Mauchly taught there before going to Penn to design ENIAC. Wikipedia puts it bluntly: > Mauchly's teaching career truly began in 1933 at Ursinus College where he was appointed head of the physics department, where he was, in fact, the only staff member.

hedora

Arguably, it was the second. The Harvard Mark 1 ran its first program in 1944, but didn’t have branches as we understand them until 1946: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvard_Mark_I Apparently, you could achieve loops by taping the input program into a physical loop, even in 1944.

LeFantome

Colossus was first: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colossus_computer

DaleBiagio

ENIAC is where the profession of programming was born — and the first programmers were six women: Kay McNulty, Betty Jennings, Betty Snyder, Marlyn Meltzer, Frances Bilas, and Ruth Lichterman. They had to program it by physically rewiring patch cables and flipping switches. There was no programming language, no stored program. The "software" was the hardware configuration itself. It took another decade before FORTRAN (1957) gave programmers a way to write instructions in something resembling human language.

JoeDaDude

For a while I worked at what was then the Sperry Rand Corporation (now Unisys) which had some pride in their heritage as the descendant of the Univac Corporation founded by ENIAC inventors Eckert and Mauchly. In a glass case there was a vacuum tube circuit said to be a memory unit of the original ENIAC. No one seemed to know much about it, casting doubt on the claimed provenance of the device. The tube circuit resembled the ones shown in the photo linked below (although none of those in the photo are from ENIAC). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Women_holding_parts_of_th...

Finnucane

"More than 30 meters long, it filled a 9 m by 15 m room and weighed about 30 kilograms." It was a balloon?

jonjacky

A newer book, from 2016, ENIAC in Action: Making and Remaking the Modern Computer by Thomas Haigh, Mark Priestly, and Crispin Rope https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262334433/eniac-in-action/ An interesting revelation here is that, although ENIAC was not originally conceived as a stored program computer, it was quite early converted to one. They repurposed a lookup table intended to calculate functions to store instructions instead. Many of the well-known ENIAC calculations, such as Monte Carlo simulations, were programmed in this mode.