PHILADELPHIA, July 11 — The Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer, known as ENIAC, was completed in 1945 at the University of Pennsylvania. According to the historical record, it was the first general-purpose electronic digital computer. Developed by John Mauchly and J.
Presper Eckert, the machine represented a fundamental break from the electromechanical calculators that preceded it. The filing shows ENIAC contained 17,468 vacuum tubes, 7,200 crystal diodes, 1,500 relays, 70,000 resistors, and 10,000 capacitors.
It weighed 30 tons and occupied 1,800 square feet. Its clock speed was 100 kHz. The machine could perform 5,000 additions per second.
From Ballistics to the Hydrogen Bomb
ENIAC was built for a specific purpose. The record shows it was used for calculations for artillery trajectory tables and for the hydrogen bomb. Programming the machine was not a matter of typing code.
It required manual rewiring and setting switches. The machine operated until 1955.
The Architecture That Followed
The timeline of development did not stop with ENIAC. The EDVAC followed in 1949. Then came UNIVAC I in 1951, which the record identifies as the first commercially available computer.
The stored-program concept, formalized by John von Neumann in his 1945 “First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC,” became the standard architecture for all subsequent computers.
What the Record Shows
The numbers themselves tell the story of the machine’s scale. Seventeen thousand vacuum tubes generated enormous heat. The 30-ton weight required reinforced flooring.
The 1,800 square feet of floor space meant the computer occupied an entire room. The 100 kHz clock speed seems glacial by today’s standards.
But the 5,000 additions per second represented a leap forward. The hydrogen bomb calculations that ENIAC performed were classified for years.
The Commercial Legacy
UNIVAC I, which became available in 1951, brought the technology out of the laboratory and into the marketplace. It was the first computer designed for business and scientific use, not just military applications. The path from ENIAC to UNIVAC was direct.
Mauchly and Eckert left the University of Pennsylvania to form the Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation, which built UNIVAC I. That company was later acquired by Remington Rand.
What to watch next: The stored-program architecture that von Neumann formalized in 1945 remains the foundation of every general-purpose computer in use today. The transition from manual rewiring to stored programs was the critical step that made software possible. ENIAC was the proof of concept.
EDVAC was the blueprint. And every computer since has followed that blueprint.
Sources
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