Who invented the ENIAC?
The ENIAC is credited as being the first electronic general-purpose computer. The acronym stands for Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer. Although earlier machines had many of the same qualities that the ENIAC exhibited, the ENIAC was the first Turing-complete digital computer capable of solving a range of computing questions. However, ENIAC was originally built as a war aid; one of its primary design goals was to aid the military in calculations for missile ballistics.
The contract to design and build ENIAC was signed in June of 1943, and construction lasted until the unveiling of the computer on February 14 of 1946. ENIAC was conceived and designed by J. Presper Eckert and John Mauchly of the University of Pennsylvania, and it was built at the University of Pennsylvania's Moore School of Electrical Engineering.
Included in the team of design engineers who helped with the development of ENIAC are Bob Shaw, Chuan Chu, Kite Sharpless, Arthur Burks, Harry Huskey, and Jack Davis. Six women who did the majority of the programming on the ENIAC were inducted into the Women in Technology International Hall of Hame in 1997, and they were Kay McNulty, Betty Jennings, Betty Snyder, Maryln Wescoff, Fran Bilas, and Ruth Lichterman.
The Components of ENIAC
Some of the building components that went into the creation of ENIAC:
- 17,468 vacuum tubes
- 70,000 resisters
- 10,000 capacitors
- 7200 crystal diodes
ENIAC weighed 30 tons, and was roughly 8.5 feet by 3 feet by 80 feet. It consumed approximately 150kW of electricity. An IBM card reader and card punch were used for input and output, respectively.
Although vacuum tube reliability caused frequent outages, vacuum tube failures were most likely during the warm-up and cool-down periods. To reduce the chances of tube failures, the ENIAC was kept online as much as possible. By only shutting the machine down infrequently, failures only occurred roughly every two days.
|
|
Comments (2)
Leave a Reply
- What is Transconductance?
Transconductance is a property of some electronic components and is also known as mutual conductance. It is the opposite of resistance. The measure of transconductance is the ratio of the electrical current change at an output port as compared to the voltage change at the input port. The measure of transconductance is commonly used in [...]...
- Who Invented the Bullet Proof Vest?
Body armor has been in use by military forces since the early middle ages. Armor of metal, leather, cloth padding, silk and other plant material has been intrinsic to military actions since that time. The bullet proof vest, however, is a more recent invention with the specific design intent of protecting its wearer from firearm [...]...
- Who Invented the Radio?
Radio was not invented by any single person, but instead was a culmination of several scientists’ research, each of whom pioneered a different area of electromagnetic radiation and radio waves during the late 1800s and early 1900s. Among these men are well known researchers such as Heinrich Rudolf Hertz, James Clerk Maxwell, David E. Hughes, [...]...
- Who Invented Electricity?
No one person invented electricity, but its modern day use is the result of the work of inventors, scientists, and researchers who toiled over the subject for millennia. In order to fully understand electricity in our modern world, one has to first understand the pioneers who date back to as early as the ancient Greeks, [...]...
- Who Invented the Telephone?
Alexander Graham Bell is commonly credited with the invention of the telephone. Bell filed a patent application for a working telephone on Feb. 14, 1876. Bell’s patent of the telephone has been successfully defended in five hundred and eighty-seven lawsuits, including five that reached the United States Supreme Court. Indeed, Alexander Graham Bell did invent [...]...
what is the main component used to make the ENIAC work?
If you mean a CPU or a central processing unit, it didn’t really have one. It did the calculations, but could only run one program at a time which humans had to input (by rewiring it) manually. You can read about its composition here.