It depended on a suite of vacuum tubes and other typical electronic tools rather than today’s integrated circuits.
What Is ENIAC?
ENIAC is an acronym for Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer.
The computer ENIAC with two operators.Apic / Getty Images
Also known as The Giant Brain, it was the first programmable general-purpose electronic digital computer.
ENIAC did not have a single moving mechanical part.
It was enormous, weighing 30 tons and occupying the 50-by-30-foot basement of the Moore School.
Lifewire / Mary McLain
Along with subsequent computers that also used vacuum tubes, ENIAC was known as a first-generation computer.
ENIAC could execute up to 5,000 additions per second, multiple orders of magnitude faster than its predecessors.
And, unlike its predecessors, it could be reprogrammed for different tasks.
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They would input a program into ENIAC using a combination of plugboard wiring and three portable function tables.
Each function table included 1200 ten-way switches for entering tables of numbers.
ENIAC’s inventors claimed that their electronic computer could compute mathematical problems 1,000 times faster than was possible before.
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ENIAC was later used to solve problems in nuclear physics, including calculating instructions for the first hydrogen bomb.
Mauchly and Eckert went on to found theEckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation, the first computer company.
That is equivalent to over $8 million in today’s money.
It didn’t have memory.
But it did have twenty accumulators that acted as storage and performed calculations.
Each accumulator could store one signed 10-digit decimal number.
They weren’t invented yet.
Instead, ENIAC relied on vacuum tubes.
The Altair was the first mass-marketed personal computer.
Made in 1974, it used Intel’s 8080 microprocessor.
Consumers could buy a kit and assemble the Altair themselves, or it could be purchased preassembled.
