The start of World War II produced a large need for computer capacity, especially for the military. New weapons were made for which trajectory tables and other essential data were needed. In 1942, John P. Eckert, John W. Mauchly (left), and their associates at the Moore school of Electrical Engineering of University of Pennsylvania decided to build a high - speed electronic computer to do the job. This machine became known as ENIAC (Electrical Numerical Integrator And Calculator) The size of ENIAC’s numerical “word” was 10 decimal digits, and it could multiply two of these numbers at a rate of 300 per second, by finding the value of each product from a multiplication table stored in its memory. ENIAC was therefore about 1,000 times faster then the previous generation of relay computers. ENIAC used 18,000 vacuum tubes, about 1,800 square feet of floor space, and consumed about 180,000 watts of electrical power. It had punched card I/O, 1 multiplier, 1 divider/square rooter, and 20 adders using decimal ring counters, which served as adders and also as quick-access (.0002 seconds) read-write register storage. The executable instructions making up a program were embodied in the separate “units” of ENIAC, which were plugged together to form a “route” for the flow of information.
These connections had to be redone after each computation, together with presetting function tables and switches. This “wire your own” technique was inconvenient (for obvious reasons), and with only some latitude could ENIAC be considered programmable. It was, however, efficient in handling the particular programs for which it had been designed. ENIAC is commonly accepted as the first successful high - speed electronic digital computer (EDC) and was used from 1946 to 1955. A controversy developed in 1971, however, over the patentability of ENIAC’s basic digital concepts, the claim being made that another physicist, John V. Atanasoff (left) had already used basically the same ideas in a simpler vacuum - tube device he had built in the 1930’s while at Iowa State College. In 1973 the courts found in favor of the company using the Atanasoff claim.
These connections had to be redone after each computation, together with presetting function tables and switches. This “wire your own” technique was inconvenient (for obvious reasons), and with only some latitude could ENIAC be considered programmable. It was, however, efficient in handling the particular programs for which it had been designed. ENIAC is commonly accepted as the first successful high - speed electronic digital computer (EDC) and was used from 1946 to 1955. A controversy developed in 1971, however, over the patentability of ENIAC’s basic digital concepts, the claim being made that another physicist, John V. Atanasoff (left) had already used basically the same ideas in a simpler vacuum - tube device he had built in the 1930’s while at Iowa State College. In 1973 the courts found in favor of the company using the Atanasoff claim.
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