"Dawn of the Giant Brains" The 18,000 Vacuum Tube Giant, the ENIAC.  On May 31, 1943, the U.S. military commissioned work on ENIAC,
The "Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer."
 Dr. J. Presper Eckert was ENIAC chief engineer, and Dr. John Mauchly, the chief consultant.
when he met John Mauchly in 1943. It took the team about one year to design ENIAC and 18 months and 500,000 U.S. dollars to build it. World War II was over by the time ENIAC was fully completed.  ENIAC was completed in 1945 and is regarded as the first successful, large scale, general purpose digital computer.
It weighed more than 27,000 kg (60,000 lb), and contained more than 18,000 vacuum tubes.  The original programmers of the ENIAC were women.
ENIAC was put to work by the military doing calculations for weather prediction, cosmic-ray studies, thermal ignition, random-number studies, wind-tunnel design and other research.  |