Forgot Valentine's Day? Never mind, today marks 75 years of the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer
- Reference: 1613392091
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2021/02/15/eniac_day/
- Source link:
Yes, we know that things actually kicked off in 1945 rather than 15 February 1946, but today's the day when, 75 years ago, the machine was launched at the University of Pennsylvania. In 2011, [2]Philadelphia City Council declared 15 February as "ENIAC Day" and we're not about to argue the point for fear of a battering with delicious cheesesteak sandwiches.
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While boffins in Blighty might point to the super-secret Colossus as predating ENIAC, the launch of this general-purpose computer was very much a public affair. Intended as an improvement on the wheel-and-disc-based differential analysers of the time, work on the electronic machine began in secret in 1943.
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The first iteration was complete by the end of 1945, and the performance jump when compared to what had gone before was breath-taking. The 30-ton, 680sq ft computer was capable of performing a ballistics calculation that might have take 12 hours previously in a mere 30 seconds. Unsurprisingly, it spent the vast majority of its operational life as the primary computing engine for the US Army.
As well as ballistic trajectories, it also saw service in solving atomic energy problems for the Manhattan Project and the design of wind tunnels.
The statistics are eyewatering for those used to the compact and power-sipping systems of recent years. ENIAC had its own power lines and consumed 150 kilowatts of electricity. Predating the era of microprocessors, it was made up of 40 nine feet tall (and two feet wide) panels, arranged in a U shape, and required 18,000 vacuum tubes (which had a habit of blowing), half a million soldered joints, 70,000 resistors and 10,000 capacitors.
It also needed to be programmed manually for each new set of calculations, a lengthy task involving setting switches and cables. Debugging involved stepping through programs one instruction at a time; a technician carried a hand-held box with a button that allowed the computer to move to the next step and the result compared with a calculation by a human.
Changes were made in 1948 to add a stored-program capability in order to greatly ease the pain and a one-hundred word magnetic core central memory unit was installed by Burroughs Corporation in 1953.
By 1955, however, the writing was on the wall as advancements in computing rendered the ENIAC obsolete and the beast was finally shut down.
Today, the computer's components can be found in museums around the world, such as London's [6]Science Museum . Other components can be found at the University of Pennsylvania and the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California.
So please join us in raising a toast to the ENIAC and the debt owed to it by the computers of today.
Further reading
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The history of the ENIAC is well documented, but we'd recommend Kevin Richey's [8]The ENIAC for a lunchtime read as well as the entry in [9]Penn Engineering's History and Heritage section . The two don't always match up (Richey lists 42 panels and over 19,000 vacuum tubes while Penn talks of 40 and 18,000, for example) but both give a flavour of its scope. ®
Get our [10]Tech Resources
[1] https://eniacday.org/about-us
[2] https://penntoday.upenn.edu/node/151687
[3] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_bootnotes/front&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=2&c=2YCqosgeHQnmFgcsoIwdBIAAAANE&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D2%26raptor%3Dcondor%26pos%3Dtop%26test%3D0
[4] https://regmedia.co.uk/2021/02/12/eniacshutterstock.jpg
[5] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_bootnotes/front&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33YCqosgeHQnmFgcsoIwdBIAAAANE&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[6] https://collection.sciencemuseumgroup.org.uk/objects/co62406/receiver-unit-from-the-eniac-computer-1943-1945-computer-component
[7] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_bootnotes/front&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44YCqosgeHQnmFgcsoIwdBIAAAANE&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[8] https://ei.cs.vt.edu/~history/ENIAC.Richey.HTML
[9] https://www.seas.upenn.edu/about/history-heritage/eniac/
[10] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
Re: British Technology Leads the World
I am convinced you don't know how old and ridiculous your claim is.
"consumed 150 kilowatts of electricity"
More or less like the average bitcoin mining machine....
Re: "consumed 150 kilowatts of electricity"
150 KW is not huge, considering that ENIAC was a Generation Zero valve machine. I don't know what its clock speed was.
By comparision, the mid-range ICL 1903 mainframe I was using in 1969 ate 40KW with all cabinets powered up: these were the CPU (including 32Kwords magnetic core memory with logic based on 1st gen chips), a disc controller, 2 x 60MB disks, 6 x tape decks, 1350 lpm printer, card reader and paper tape reader plus an ASR33 teletype operator's console. IOW, the 1903 mainframe still consumed 25% of the power needed by ENIAC despite using solid state logic running at a whole 3.5 uS clock speed (28000 cycles/sec).
Maybe a better comparison would be with the HP28s calculator I got in 1990. This, still working perfectly, runs off 3 N size alkalines and, even when used much more regularly than when I got it, has never run for less than a year on a set of batteries.
"fear of a battering with delicious cheesesteak sandwiches"
Cheesesteak sandwiches ? When all the restaurants are closed ?
BRING IT ON !!
Re: "fear of a battering with delicious cheesesteak sandwiches"
Do the Merkins know what real cheese is though? They think cheese come out of a squeezy bottle!
Re: "fear of a battering with delicious cheesesteak sandwiches"
No, most of the Philly cheesesteak folks I know are rather specific about the quality of the cheese, meat, bread and other bits. That's why it's a meal held in rather high regard.
Good old ENIAC. All but forgotten.
Thanks for reminding us... I nearly forgot about ENIAC.
ENIAC, the reference defining how far we've come
When your debugging session required a technician and line-by-line computation verification, you were heavily incited to think about your code twice - if not more.
18,000 vacuum tubes (or 19K, who's counting ?). Can you imagine a modern datacenter based on that ? You'd have twenty guys replacing the broken ones day in and day out. The vacuum tube industry would be more important than Exxon.
The industry has come a very long way in a very short time. Always makes me wonder what will come by in the next ten years.
Re: ENIAC, the reference defining how far we've come
ENIAC had guys pushing shopping carts with spare vacuum tubes in them around the site. Dead tubes would be replaced while the machine was running. Calculations would be run three times; if you got the same answer twice, that was probably the correct answer.
And science fiction stories about giant computers with lots of vacuum tubes proliferated; Asimov’s MULTIVAC stories are probably the most famous, ending in the religion-destroying “The Last Question”. Clarke had two religion-destroying stories, but only “The Nine Billion Names of God” used computers, and he didn’t specify how the computers were built. (Note that the ‘AC’ in MULTIVAC stood for ‘Analog Computer’, digital computers were considered second-rate.)
I have all of Gerry Anderson’s 1960s puppet shows around somewhere; I still remember the astonishing speed of the ‘latest French supercomputer’, from the first episode of _Joe 90_, which could retrieve one byte in 5 nanoseconds. And it used lasers, not transistors or vacuum tubes… And the way that BIG RAT depended on magnetic tape. Lots and lots and lots of magnetic tape.
> By 1955, however,...
Nowadays you'd be delighted to get 10 years support for a product that is in any way related to computing equipment.
British Technology Leads the World
Just as with the supersonic aircraft, British scientists and engineers tempted over the pond to "share" information, Turing and others found that the US had basically nothing and the transfer was all one way. Meanwhile, the British government sat on everything that had a military angle, largely suffocating it.