Lesson 3 of 81945–19487 min
ENIAC and the stored program
On 14 February 1946 the University of Pennsylvania showed the world ENIAC: 17,468 vacuum tubes, 30 tons, 1,800 square feet of floor space, about 5,000 additions a second. Built at the Moore School for the US Army, it computed artillery firing tables; a trajectory that took a person 12 hours by hand took it about 30 seconds.
Its programmers were six women: Kathleen Antonelli, Jean Bartik, Betty Holberton, Marlyn Meltzer, Frances Spence and Ruth Teitelbaum. To give ENIAC a new job, they worked from diagrams, plugged in cables and set switches by hand. The machine had no place to keep a program. That was its great weakness, and fixing it defined the computer.
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Sources
- The world's first general purpose computer turns 75 — Penn Today, University of Pennsylvania
- Celebrating Penn Engineering History: ENIAC — Penn Engineering
- First draft of a report on the EDVAC (J. von Neumann, 1945) — Internet Archive (Smithsonian Libraries copy)
- “The Baby”: the world's first stored-program computer — Digital 60, University of Manchester