Word: eniac
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...look at most history books, they'll tell you ENIAC (for Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer) was the first true all-purpose electronic computer. Unveiled in 1946 in a blaze of publicity, it was a monstrous 30-ton machine, as big as two semis and filled with enough vacuum tubes (19,000), switches (6,000) and blinking lights to require an army of attendants. Capable of adding 5,000 numbers in a second, a then unheard of feat, it could compute the trajectory of an artillery shell well before it landed (compared with days of labored hand calculations...
Apparently not. As Kasparov suspected, his duel with Deep Blue indeed became an icon in musings on the meaning and dignity of human life. While the world monitored his narrow escape from a historic defeat--and at the same time marked the 50th birthday of the first real computer, ENIAC--he seemed to personify some kind of identity crisis that computers have induced in our species...
Ryle's book was published three years after ENIAC's birth, and at first glance his ideas would seem to draw strength from the computer age. That, at any rate, is the line Dennett takes in defending his teacher's school of thought. Dennett notes that AI is progressing, creating smart machines that process data somewhat the way human beings do. As this trend continues, he believes, it will become clearer that we're all machines, that Ryle's strict materialism was basically on target, that the mind-body problem is in principle solved. The title of Dennett...
DIED. J. PRESPER ECKERT, 76, co-inventor of the first fully electronic digital computer; in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania. In 1943 Eckert and the late John W. Maulchy created the eniac (electronic numerical integrator and computer), a 30-ton leviathan that was 1,000 times as speedy as the standard calculators of its day, making it invaluable for plotting the trajectory of artillery shells-and for designing the first atom bomb...
...ENIAC was decommissioned in 1955, having churned out military and scientific calculations for nearly a decade. Today its cabinet-size modules are scattered among several museums and institu tions. Four remain at the Moore School, gathering dust and cobwebs in a foyer off the old building's main hallway. Nearby, someone has hung a contemporary computer chip and a sign that says it all: "In less than 40 years, advances in microelectronics technology have enabled the digital computer with performance far superior to the ENIAC to be placed on a onequarter-inch piece of silicon...