This is how it started, folks!
The machine designed by Drs. Eckert and Mauchly was a monstrosity. When it was finished, the ENIAC filled an entire room, weighed thirty tons, and consumed two hundred kilowatts of power. It generated so much heat that it had to be placed in one of the few rooms at the University with a forced air cooling system.
Vacuum tubes, over 19,000 of them, were the principal elements in the computer’s circuitry. It also had fifteen hundred relays and hundreds of thousands of resistors, capacitors, and inductors.
All of this electronics were held in forty-two panels nine feet tall, two feet wide, and one foot thick. They were arranged in a “U” shape, with three panels on wheels so they could be moved around. An IBM card reader and card punch were used respectively for input and output.
14 February 1946 was ENIAC’s birthday — the day it was announced. The following day it was officially dedicated by the University of Pennsylvania. They still have some of the original panels in their ENIAC Museum. The first electronic numerical integrator and computer — ENIAC for short.
Less than 10 years later it was shut down as obsolete.
Less than 10 years later it was shut down as obsolete.
BS!
I got Vista running on mine!
Well, it was the first to be officially announced. I think Colossus was the first to exist.
10 years! Microsoft should wait that long before obsoleting their products.
Small clarification. It was the first all digital computer. There were analog computers, and mechanical computers long before this. It wasn’t until the development of transistor and integrated circuit in the 60’s (reverse engineered from the Roswell New Mexico ufo crash none the less) that digital computers became faster than the analog and and mechanical solvers that had been around since the early Babbage machines.
The guy in the middle of the picture stares wistfully at the array of rotary knobs, wondering when they will be able to upgrade to a 3D card and color monitor.
I remember the old ENIAC LapTops. They had a mouse so big you needed a crane to move the pong style cursor. Ahh… those where the days. I can still smell the boxes of punch cards and here the poor slob crying who dumped them on the floor when I knocked ’em outta his hands. Good Times….Good Times.
You know there’s some idiot still trying to compile Linux on this thing to run his home network.
Geez, had no idea you guys were that old. 🙂
My first computer was a Vic-20, and I could you my joystick to move the cursor around the screen.
When I was BBS’ing, made sysop’s laugh when they read my posts, because there always was a large hole in the middle.
The Vic-20 was a 40 column layout, so I would enter spaces near the end of the screen to bring me into a new line, then continue my sentence.
Now that’s retro.
Sonny boy, back in my day I had to wire-wrap my own computer and hand-assemble its own OS on paper, then burn it into EPROM with my own wire-wrapped EPROM burner, up hill, in the snow, both ways…
(off to rinse my dentures)
The Atanasoff Berry Computer was first! It’s design was stolen and expanded upon to create the ENIAC.
http://www.cs.iastate.edu/jva/jva-archive.shtml
Pretty kool, #11. Fits right in with the 14 other guys who flew before the Wright Brothers.
Not to stifle the merriment, but – operated until 1956? Really? By then the Mark II had morphed into the Univac which had been bought as a product by Remington-Rand. The first compiler had been put together by Grace Murry “Grandma COBOL” Hopper and she had moved on to start inventing the first English-like computer language. COBOL, of course.
It’s kind of surprising ENIAC hadn’t long since been junked by then.
#5 – I love your interpretation of the history of the transistor, but wasn’t the basic device patented by Bell Labs in the late 1940s? Of course, that doesn’t mean they didn’t steal it from the Greys. A friend of a friend claims he saw the actual, real autopsy of an alien on TV, so there’s proof they exist.
A customer of mine, Mr. Beck was on the team of 24 people that built that. He doesn’t even have a PC now, which I can’t understand.
He’s getting up in years but I watched him change the brakes on his minivan.
Well back in my day, I used to boot the computer up with a hand crank that fit in the front. Once it was up and running, I hooked it up to a series of grapefruits with electrodes stuck in them. Since cathode ray tubes were still centuries in the future, I had a little munchkin sitting in the box drawing pictures. Today’s graphic user interfaces have nothing on what I did back then.
Oh dear, that lovely little nurse says it is time for my nap.
And then someone glued a music box to a vintage typewriter and said “My analogue Macintosh can outperform that Eniac, it even has integrated sound.”
GregA- He he, Loved that post. Roswell, hehehe. Actually you may be right.
15. Kinda reminds me of my Etch-A-Sketch or what I like to call “Computer for Dummies”.
I did a little write up on John P. Eckert, and some of the history surrounding he and his partners in developing ENIAC.
Check it out on my blog at:
http://timarcher.com/?q=node/33
One of the most notable things about ENIAC is just how huge that thing was! ENIAC used 18,000 vacuum tubes, occupied 1,800 sq ft of floor space, and consumed about 180,000 watts of electrical power.