• ENIAC spanned nearly 17 metres and filled most of a 9-by-17 metre room. It could perform 38 divisions and 357 multiplications in less than a second.
• ENIAC was noisy and emitted an incredible heat because it had 17,000 vacuum tubes — sealed glass containers conducting electrical currents.
• Scientists at the University of Pennsylvania first invented ENIAC for the U.S. army in 1945.
• ENIAC was based on a device called the Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator (ASCC), devised one year earlier for the U.S. Navy.
• International Business Machine Corporation (IBM) debuted ASCC in 1944. ASCC was a complex calculator invented by Harvard University. It weighed 4.5 tonnes and measured 15.5 metres.
• IBM unveiled its first calculating machine in 1938.
• The Complex Number Calculator was the first remote machine to perform simple math equations.
• In 1946, computers took just two hours to equate what it used to take 100 engineers a whole year to do.
• Although the sophistication of computing machines vary, all of them are based on a similar model. A desktop computer is more elaborate than a car odometer but both work on a system that tallies numbers.
• ENIAC's power is overshadowed by today's calculator, which contains more memory than the early computer.
• By 1971, Intel had developed a 12-millimetre computer chip with 12 times the capability of ENIAC.
• ENIAC is credited as being the first "large-scale, electronic, digital computer capable of being reprogrammed to solve a full range of computing problems." But several other similar machines were developed in the early 1940s. These included Germany's Z3, America's Atanasoff-Berry Computer (ABC) and Britain's Colossus computer.
(archives.cbc.ca)
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