The ENIAC |
The ENIAC was a large-scale, general purpose digital electronic computer. Built
out of some 17,468 electronic vacuum tubes, ENIAC was in its time the largest single
electronic apparatus in the world. There were two fundamental technical innovations in
the ENIAC. The first had to do with combining very diverse technical components and
design ideas into a single system that could perform 5,000 additions and 300
multiplications per second. Although slow by today's standards--current
microprocessors perform 100 million additions per second--this was two
to three orders of magnitude (100 to 1,000 times) faster than existing mechanical
computers or calculators. The sheer speed of the machine and its limited, but
sufficiently versatile, programming mechanisms allowed the ENIAC to demonstrate that
electronic computing could be applied to some of the nation's most pressing problems,
such as the development of the hydrogen bomb. The significance of electronic computing
to national security was an important factor in the birth of the modern computing
industry.
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 The initiating and cycling units of ENIAC, 1946. The picture on the oscilloscope shows one of the fundamental electrical signals transmitted to all units of the machine. The bulk of the neons above the scope correspond to the twenty different parts of an addition. Each of the parts represent 1/100,000 of a second. (click to expand to 165k) |
 Article on ENIAC, "Answers by Eny," Newsweek, 18 February 1946. (click to expand to 303k) |
The second, and equally
impressive, technical achievement was the machine's reliability. Many others working
on large-scale precision machinery, such as electronic fire control systems and
differential analyzers, considered the possibility of electronic computation before
either Mauchly or Atanasoff. These scientists, however, rejected digital electronic
computing, because they felt that a system large enough to do useful computations would
require too many vacuum tubes to provide reliable operation. As the main project
engineer for the ENIAC, J. Presper Eckert proved to be an outstanding engineer who
overcame the most difficult technical challenges in building the ENIAC. The rigorous
vacuum tube reliability studies that he oversaw and the cautious reliability design
methods adopted by the entire ENIAC project team made it possible to operate the ENIAC,
with all of its vacuum tubes, within a comfortable margin of reliability.
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* Some pertinent web resources:
Last update: Thursday, 02-Aug-2012 15:07:44 EDT