Word: eniac
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...copying down the results--that in those days was measured in "girl hours." Then she was invited by the University of Pennsylvania's Moore School of Electrical Engineering to help J. Presper Eckert and John Mauchly put the finishing touches on a new kind of computing device called ENIAC (for Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer). That machine and its descendants were destined not only to make her old job obsolete but to change the world profoundly...
...last week McNulty (now the widowed Mrs. John Mauchly), Eckert and 500 computer enthusiasts gathered at a "black-tie optional and hackerwear essential" party at Boston's Computer Museum to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the dedication of the first all-electronic digital computer. On that day in 1946, ENIAC in 20 seconds performed a mathematical calculation that would otherwise have required 40 girl hours to complete. Newspapers headlined the performance. It "solves the unsolvable," reported the Philadelphia Inquirer. Indeed, many experts mark ENIAC's feat as the beginning of the modern computer...
...every measure, ENIAC was an imposing machine. It weighed 30 tons and occupied a space as large as a boxcar. Its 40 modular memory and processing units, each housed in a 9-ft.-high black metal cabinet and bristling with dials, wires and indicator lights, filled a room the size of a small gymnasium. Its 18,000 vacuum tubes radiated so much heat that industrial cooling fans were needed to keep its circuitry from melting down...
Created at the University of Pennsylvania, ENIAC weighed 30 tons and contained 18,000 vacuum tubes, which failed at an average of one every seven minutes. The arrival of the transistor and the miniaturized circuit in the 1950s made it possible to reduce a room-size computer to a silicon chip the size of a pea. And prices kept dropping. In contrast to the $487,000 paid for ENIAC, a top IBM personal computer today costs about $4,000, and some discounters offer a basic Timex-Sinclair 1000 for $77.95. One computer expert illustrates the trend by estimating that...
...first electronic digital computer in the U.S., unveiled at the University of Pennsylvania in 1946, was a collection of 18,000 vacuum tubes, 70,000 resistors, 10,000 capacitors and 6,000 switches, and occupied the space of a two-car garage. Yet ENIAC (for Electronic Numerical Integrator and Calculator) was, in retrospect, a dimwit. When it worked, it did so only for short bursts because its tubes kept burning out. Built to calculate artillery firing tables, the half-million dollar ENIAC could perform 5,000 additions or subtractions per second. Today almost any home computer, costing only...