Word: eniac
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Unveiled in 1971, the one-chip CPU - or microprocessor - contained 2,250 transistors in an area barely a sixth of an inch long and an eighth of an inch wide. In computational power, the micro processor almost matched the monstrous ENIAC - the first fully electronic computer, completed in 1946 - and performed as well as an early 1960s IBM machine that cost $30,000 and required a CPU that alone was the size of a large desk. On his office wall, Hoff still displays Intel's original advertisement: "Announcing a new era of integrated electronics ... a microprogrammable computer...
...operating with only a fraction of the electricity needed by the vacuum tube, the "solid-state" device proved ideal for making not only inexpensive portable radios and tape recorders but computers as well. Indeed, without the transistor, the computer might never have advanced much beyond the bulky and fickle ENIAC, which was burdened with thousands of large vacuum tubes that consumed great amounts of power, generated tremendous quantities of heat, and frequently burned out. In an industry striving for miniaturization, the transistors, too, soon began to shrink. By 1960, engineers had devised photolithographic and other processes (see box) that enabled...
...ladies knitting." The noise came from the rapid opening and closing of thousands of little switches, and it represented an enormous information flow and extremely long calculations for the time. In less than five seconds, Mark I could multiply two 23-digit numbers, a record that lasted until ENIAC'S debut two years later. But how? In part, the answer lies in a beguilingly simple form of arithmetic: the binary system. Instead of the ten digits (0 through 9) of the familiar decimal system, the computer uses just the binary's two symbols (1 and 0). And with...
While Babbage's engine also included the concept of programmed instructions, today's machines are significantly different as a result of a refinement proposed in the 1940s by the Hungarian-born mathematical genius John von Neumann. After seeing ENIAC, he suggested "writing" both the data to be handled by the computer and the instructions for doing the job in the same memory and using the same code. It was a key innovation in computer theory, for it meant that the machine could cope with instructions just as if they were data. As Texas Instruments' William C. Holton...
...computer is thus the ultimate machine. It can do anything any machine could do, so in one sense it is the end of progress. All of history before the construction of ENIAC in 1944 was but the slow gestation of the monster that is now taking its first halting steps. The rest of history will consist wholly of the development of its potential...