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.