1946: ENIAC - The book of science

ENIAC
Spawn of ENIAC
Reliability
Programmers
Commentary

John Grist Brainerd, John Mauchly, J. Presper Eckert computer science

ENIAC

The Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer,
assembled at the Moore School of Electrical Engineering
at 200 South 33rd Street in Philadelphia,
was the first digital programmable Turing-complete
general-purpose electronic computer.
John Grist Brainerd was the manager of the project.
John Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert designed it.
John von Neumann acted as a consultant.
ENIAC had 17,468 vacuum tubes,
70,000 resistors, 10,000 capacitors, and 1,500 relays.
ENIAC was programmed
by turning up to 6,000 manual switches
and moving jumper cables.
Kay McNulty (Mauchly, Antonelli),
Betty “Jean” Jennings (Bartik),
Francis “Betty” Snyder (Holberton),
Marlyn Meltzer (Spence),
Fran Bilas (Spence),
and Ruth Lichterman (Teitelbaum)
were ENIAC’s first programmers.

Spawn of ENIAC

“Baby,” Manchester Small-Scale Experimental Machine, 1948
Manchester Mark 1, 1949
EDSAC, Electronic Delay Storage Automatic Calculator, 1949
BINAC, Binary Automatic Computer, 1949
CSIRAC, Council for Scientific and Industrial Research Automatic Computer, 1949
SEAC, Standards Eastern Automatic Computer, 1950
SWAC, Standards Western Automatic Computer, 1950
ERA 1101, Engineering Research Associates 1101, 1950
EDVAC, Electronic Discrete Variable Automatic Calculator, 1951
UNIVAC I, Universal Automatic Computer I, 1951
ORDVAC, Ordnance Variable Automatic Computer, 1952

Reliability

Even when operating vacuum tubes
at half their normal voltage,
tube failures were regular occurrences
but worth the time to find and replace them
for the tubes provided much faster operation
than mechanical switches would have.

Programmers

The six women who programmed ENIAC
without an operating system or programming language,
given only the logical diagrams of the machine,
were not given credit at the time,
nor were some recognized in their lifetimes,
nor were they all invited or honored
at the fiftieth anniversary event.
Let’s think of this before we complain
of men who don’t get their due rewards.

While ENIAC was being built, J. Presper Eckert, John Mauchly, John von Neumann, A. W. Burks, and Captain H. Goldstine were selected to work on a new computer that would take advantage of the lessons that they were learning from ENIAC. They called this new computer EDVAC. The EDVAC was smaller than the ENIAC, eliminated parallel operations, and stored its own program code. It was completed in August 1949 and it started limited operations in late 1951. Meanwhile, von Neumann’s report on the EDVAC inspired similar projects in England, Australia, and elsewhere in the United States.