21 Facts About ENIAC

ENIAC was the first programmable, electronic, general-purpose digital computer, completed in 1945.

ENIAC was completed in 1945 and first put to work for practical purposes on December 10, 1945.

ENIAC was formally dedicated at the University of Pennsylvania on February 15, 1946, having cost $487, 000, and was heralded as a "Giant Brain" by the press.

ENIAC was formally accepted by the U S Army Ordnance Corps in July 1946.

ENIAC was a large, modular computer, composed of individual panels to perform different functions.

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ENIAC used ten-position ring counters to store digits; each digit required 36 vacuum tubes, 10 of which were the dual triodes making up the flip-flops of the ring counter.

ENIAC is able to process about 500 FLOPS, compared to modern supercomputers' petascale and exascale computing power.

ENIAC used common octal-base radio tubes of the day; the decimal accumulators were made of 6SN7 flip-flops, while 6L7s, 6SJ7s, 6SA7s and 6AC7s were used in logic functions.

ENIAC could be programmed to perform complex sequences of operations, including loops, branches, and subroutines.

However, instead of the stored-program computers that exist today, ENIAC was just a large collection of arithmetic machines, which originally had programs set up into the machine by a combination of plugboard wiring and three portable function tables.

The original programmers of the ENIAC were neither recognized for their efforts nor known to the public until the mid-1980s.

John von Neumann and Stanislaw Ulam realized the speed of ENIAC would allow these calculations to be done much more quickly.

ENIAC was shut down on November 9, 1946, for a refurbishment and a memory upgrade, and was transferred to Aberdeen Proving Ground, Maryland in 1947.

Programming of the stored program for ENIAC was done by Betty Jennings, Clippinger, Adele Goldstine and others.

ENIAC was, like the IBM Harvard Mark I and the German Z3, able to run an arbitrary sequence of mathematical operations, but did not read them from a tape.

ENIAC's registers performed decimal arithmetic, rather than binary arithmetic like the Z3, the ABC and Colossus.

The public demonstration for ENIAC was developed by Snyder and Jennings who created a demo that would calculate the trajectory of a missile in 15 seconds, a task that would have taken several weeks for a human computer.

The decision included: that the ENIAC inventors had derived the subject matter of the electronic digital computer from Atanasoff; gave legal recognition to Atanasoff as the inventor of the first electronic digital computer; and put the invention of the electronic digital computer in the public domain.

In 1997, the six women who did most of the programming of ENIAC were inducted into the Technology International Hall of Fame.

The role of the ENIAC programmers is treated in a 2010 documentary film titled Top Secret Rosies: The Female "Computers" of WWII by LeAnn Erickson.

In 2011, in honor of the 65th anniversary of the ENIAC's unveiling, the city of Philadelphia declared February 15 as ENIAC Day.