ENIAC stands for Electronic Numerical Integrator And Computer and was initially used to calculate artillery firing tables for the US Army. ENIAC was capable of calculate the angle of inclination which was to be used in artillery to achieve the objective taking into account its range, the type of projectile, the detonating charge and even the environmental conditions.
If it is true that it was not really the first computer general purpose that was released to the market, a title that fell on the Z1, a German computer used by the German army that ended up being destroyed during the conflict to avoid leaving traces when Germany got closer to the end of the war and thus avoid leaving evidence.
The world’s first PC
This project was carried out by the University of Pennsylvania (which is why many of the people responsible for this project worked at that university) with the fUS military funding and the Artillery Corps and had a cost of almost half a million dollars (nearly $6 million taking into account dollar inflation since its first registration in 1956).
It was capable of performing 5,000 additions and 300 multiplications per second (very far from the operations that today’s quantum computers can perform) thanks to the 17,768 electronic valves that made it up, 7,200 crystal diodes, 70,000 resistors , 10,000 capacitors and 1,500 relays.
ENIC had dimensions of 2.4 x 0.9 x 30 meters and weighed 27 tons and used 1,500 electromagnetic switches and had up to 6,000 switches that had to be pressed indiscriminately depending on the calculation to be performed.
Despite these figures, at the time, ENIC was only capable of store in memory 300 numbers. To read the data it was necessary to analyze, because for almost 150 years, punched cards were used and it worked thanks to machine code and any modification of its code required several weeks of work until it was optimized (at that time there was no beta version). versions).
Design and development of ENIC
The design of the first computer was carried out by John William Mauchlythe hardware has been supported John Presper Eckert while 6 women were in charge of programming tasks: Betty Snyder Holberton (known for her contribution to the development of the Cobol programming language), Betty Jean Jennings Bartik (mathematics from the University of Pennsylvania), Kathleen McNulty Maunchly Antenelli (Irish mathematics), Marlyn Wescoff Meltzer (mathematician and engineer from the University of Pennsylvania, Ruth Lichterman Teitelbaum (mathematics and engineering) and Frances Bilas Spence (mathematician and expert in theoretical physics).
The women responsible for software who brought ENIAC to life laid the foundations for simple and accessible programming, although it was not until the mid-1980s that they were truly recognized for the merit they had in its development, because until then they had not been considered part of its development, when in reality it was the most important part.
The development of the ENIC commented on in 1943 was completed in 1945 and it was not until 1946 that it was introduced and began to be used by the US military. ENIC’s life finally ended in 1955, when the first general-purpose computer went offline.
