ENIAC
- Date
- 1945 · confidence high
- Place
- Moore School, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, United States
- Credited to
- J. Presper Eckert and John Mauchly
- People
- 👤 Betty Snyder Holberton1917–2001👤 Jean Bartik1924–2011👤 John Presper Eckert1919–1995👤 John William Mauchly1907–1980👤 Marlyn Wescoff Meltzer1922–2008👤 Ruth Lichterman Teitelbaum1924–1986
- Field
- Knowledge & symbols
⚠️ Disputed: the sources disagree.
What it is
18,000-valve machine capable of thousands of operations per second, programmed via cables and switches to calculate ballistic tables. It demonstrated that large-scale electronic computing was viable.
Priority as the first electronic computer is disputed with Colossus (1943, secret) and Atanasoff's ABC; a 1973 court ruling invalidated the Eckert-Mauchly patent in favour of Atanasoff. Completed in November 1945 and unveiled in February 1946.
What it led to
- The commercial computer industry (UNIVAC) and computing as a discipline
- Stored-program architecture and the military-academic dependence of Cold War computing
- Nuclear and weather simulations that drove the arms race
Built on
- Tabulating machine1890–1906
- Vacuum tube (Fleming diode, De Forest triode)1904–1906
- Colossus computer1943–1944
- Bush's differential analyser
Made possible
- Stored-program (von Neumann) architecture1945
- Monte Carlo method1946
- CSIRAC computer1949
- UNIVAC I commercial computer1951
- TIFRAC, first Indian electronic computer1960
- EDVAC and the von Neumann architecture
- Numerical weather prediction