Today in Computer History (02/14/2024):
Today is Valentine’s Day, which means we say a very special happy birthday to the ENIAC! Today, February 14th 2024, the first ever electric, programmable, general purpose digital computer turns 79 years old!
(Picture via University of Pennsylvania)
Completed in 1945, the ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer) was the first computer to integrate all its features into one unit. The ENIAC took up more than 1,800 square feet and weighed over 27 ton, and was made up of 40 panels, 17,000 vacuum tubes, 7,200 crystal diodes, 1,500 relays, 70,000 resistors, 10,000 capacitors, and over 5,000,000 hand-soldered joints. These numbers have gotten bigger over time, of course. Today, a single stick of 4gb RAM has somewhere in the ballpark of 32 billion capacitors.
The ENIAC could perform up to 5,000 additions or 50 multiplications per second, with a clock speed of around 100 kilohertz. It calculated trajectories 40 times faster than humans could. For additional context by modeling calculators, the classic Ti-84 plus (2004), one of the most used calculators to this day, has a clock speed of 15 megahertz, 150 times faster than the ENIAC.
The ENIAC was the first dive into digital calculators in the modern age, retired in 1955 at ten years old. And nearly eight decades later, we now carry devices with calculators in our pockets. The ENIAC was thousands of times bigger than the largest smartphones on the modern market, and part of it is on display at the University of Engineering and Applied Science at the University of Pennsylvania.
(Picture via Wikipedia)