📱 💻 Before smartphones, before laptops, before the internet … there was a room-sized machine at the University of Pennsylvania that started it all. 🏛️
In 1946, Penn’s Moore School of Electrical Engineering unveiled ENIAC, the world’s first general-purpose electronic computer. It weighed 30 tons, stretched across 1,800 square feet, and was packed with 18,000 vacuum tubes and 5 million hand-soldered joints. It consumed so much power that legend has it the lights in nearby Philadelphia neighborhoods would dim whenever it fired up.
What made ENIAC revolutionary wasn’t just its scale; it was the fact that it could be reprogrammed to solve different problems, not just one fixed task. That idea is the backbone of every computer that exists today.
👩💻✊ And the unsung heroes behind it? Six women mathematicians—known as the “ENIAC Six”—who did the grueling work of actually programming the machine. For decades their contributions went unrecognized, though they’re now celebrated as the first computer programmers in history.
Every time you open a laptop, you’re looking at ENIAC’s great-great-grandchild. And it was born at the University of Pennsylvania.
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