9 ms·

Eniac, the First General-Purpose Digital Computer, Turns 80

• josefritzishere 6mo ago
  One of the engineers who worked on the Eniac lived next door to my old landlord in New Jersey. They played chess in the back yard. He was reputedly quite good.
• rvz 6mo ago
  Unfortunately, if the subject doesn't have "AI", no one cares.
  • xattt 6mo ago
    It has IA in its name so that must count for something.
    • embedding-shape 6mo ago
      That's AI in Spanish, so checks out in large parts of the world :)
  • casey2 6mo ago
    It's wild that in 100 years we went from room sized calculators to AGSI capable of destroying the planet. next 20 years ;)
• gerikson 6mo ago
  > The computer contained about 18,000 vacuum tubes, which were cooled by 80 air blowers. More than 30 meters long, it filled a 9 m by 15 m room and weighed about 30 kilograms. It consumed as much electricity as a small town. Surprisingly light though...
  • ahartmetz 6mo ago
    The vacuum in the tubes weighs nothing, so they produce lift.
  • gus_massa 6mo ago
    I still remember the CRT TV we had at home when I was kid. It was big but almost empty. Vacuum tubes break too often. Once per year? But if you have a thousand of them you have to change one very often. So I guess they have a lot of space for humans repairing it.
  • adrian_b 6mo ago
    An obvious typo. It was tons, not kilograms. Perhaps AI aided?
• Rochus 6mo ago
  Eniac was indeed impressive and an important milestone. I recommend the 1999 book "ENIAC - The triumphs and tragedies of the world's first computer" by Scott McCartney which is both interesting to read and very informative. Also the review of the book by the late Jean Bartik, one of the "computers" and thus an eyewitnmess, is very interesting: https://web.archive.org/web/20221101120020/https://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-reviews/R3K2DSB6UE1X7H/ref%3Dcm_cr_getr_d_rvw_ttl?ie=UTF8&ASIN=0802713483 https://web.archive.org/web/20221101120020/https://www.amazo.... Though the article is very US focussed, keeping quiet that German engineer Konrad Zuse completed the Z3 in May 1941, five years before ENIAC, effectively creating the world's first working programmable and fully automatic digital computer. While ENIAC required days of manual cable patching to program, the Z3 was quickly programmed by a punched tape ("Lochstreifen"), and Zuse also has invented Plankalkül between 1942 and 1945, which is widely recognized as the world's first high-level programming language. The cooperation between Zuse and ETH Zurich eventually led to the first self-compiling compiler and eventually Algol 60 (see "The European Side of the Last Phase of the Development of ALGOL 60" by Peter Naur in ACM SIGPLAN "History of Programming Languages" from 1978). And there was also the British Colossus, which was also a "programmable computer" and successfully utilized vacuum tubes for code-breaking by early 1944.
  • deleted 6mo ago
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  • mrob 6mo ago
    The Z3 was only general purpose by accident, and this was only discovered in 1997 (published 1998). [0] It's only of theoretical interest because the technique required is too inefficient for real-world applications. ENIAC is notable because it was the first intentionally general purpose computer to be built. [0] https://www.inf.fu-berlin.de/inst/ag-ki/rojas_home/documents/1997/Universal_Computer.pdf https://www.inf.fu-berlin.de/inst/ag-ki/rojas_home/documents...
    • ahartmetz 6mo ago
      Still feels like history written by the victors (of WW2 and computing, eventually) in this case. If you want to be mathematically precise, it's been proven to be Turing-complete. If you want to use common sense (IMO better), it was one of the most significant leaps in automated computation and simply didn't need to do more for its intended applications. For conditional branches to make sense, you also need a fast temporary storage array (since it would be awfully slow running directly off tape like a Turing machine), and to realize that all that effort makes sense, you first need to play with a computer for a while and discover the new possibilities.
• klelatti 6mo ago
  ENIAC was very important but this article overstates its significance and ignores other (non US) machines to the point of historical inaccuracy. No mention of Z3 or Manchester Baby for example, the latter based on the von Neumann paper for example, was arguably a more accurate pointer towards how computer architecture would develop.
  • sebastos 6mo ago
    Wait, where are you thinking the von Neumann paper which came from?
    • klelatti 6mo ago
      The paper came out of work on ENIAC and was adapted to follow the approach in the paper but Baby was built from outset to use that approach and its design much more closely matches the architecture that has been used by almost all digital computers since. I don’t dispute that ENIAC is important but it’s role is more nuanced than this article implies.
    • adrian_b 6mo ago
      The von Neumann report was written after von Neumann had several discussions with the ENIAC team about how to make a better computer as a successor for ENIAC. The report was not published formally, but it was "leaked", so it does not have any credits for the ideas contained in it. Because of this, with few exceptions it is impossible to determine with certainty which parts of the report are original ideas of von Neumann and which parts are ideas that von Neumann might have learned during the discussions with the ENIAC team. An example of an idea that certainly did not come from the ENIAC team was the proposal to use an iconoscope CRT as the main memory (which was implemented first in the British Manchester computers, so such a memory became known as a Williams-Kilburn tube). The ENIAC team had a different idea of what to use as a memory, i.e. delay lines taken from radars. Von Neumann replaced this suggestion with a CRT, because he thought that a random-access memory is better. The von Neumann report had an exceptional importance because it defined with perfect clarity what a digital computer should be, which should be its structure and then provided a detailed description of how such a computer should be designed, which was good enough to enable anyone who read the report to build such a computer. This effect really happened, and a great number of teams at universities, government agencies, independent research centers like IAS and various companies, both in USA and in other countries, have built electronic computers in the following decade, exploring various design options. There is no doubt that the clarity of the report is due to von Neumann and whichever were the ideas of the ENIAC team about a future computer, they were much more jumbled. Because the ENIAC team did not publish their ideas (and they did not intend to, because they already wanted to monetize what they had learned about computers, by founding a private company), it does not really matter what they thought. The world has learned how to make general-purpose electronic computers from the von Neumann report. ENIAC was a programmable computing automaton, but it was not a digital computer in the modern sense of the word, i.e. a digital system with 4 levels of closed positive-feedback loops (the complexity of a digital system is determined by the number of levels of nested positive-feedback loops, combinational logic has 0 levels, a memory has 1 level, an automaton has 2 levels, a processor has 3 levels and a computer has 4 levels; these are minimum numbers, as a real device may have more levels than strictly necessary, to achieve various advantages).
• adrian_b 6mo ago
  The shortened title is very incorrect. What the article says is different: "the first large-scale, general-purpose, programmable electronic digital computer". The claim of the article can be considered correct, and "electronic" is a part that cannot be deleted from it without falsifying the claim. Before ENIAC, there have been digital computers that were much more general-purpose, because they run programs written on punched tape, instead of requiring a rewiring like ENIAC. ENIAC, which evolved from the analog computers known as differential analyzers, had a structure closer to an FPGA than to a modern digital computer. In contrast, an earlier relay computer like Harvard Mark I was intended as a successor of the mechanical digital computer designed by Charles Babbage, so it already had the same structure with a modern digital computer, except that it used different kind of memories for data and for programs, hence the name "Harvard architecture". The same was true for the Zuse computer. The earlier ABC digital computer was electronic, but it can be considered as special-purpose, not general-purpose. The first relay computers at Bell Labs may also be considered as special purpose.
  • mrob 6mo ago
    In this context, "general purpose" means "Turing complete" in the informal sense of handwaving away the requirement for infinite storage space.
    • adrian_b 6mo ago
      What you say changes nothing. The earlier relay computers were Turing complete. For ENIAC it also does not make sense to claim that it was Turing complete. Such a claim can be made for a computer controlled by a program memory, where you have a defined instruction set, and the instruction set may be complete or not. If you may rewire arbitrarily the execution units, any computer is Turing complete. The earlier ABC electronic computer was built for a special purpose, the solution of systems of linear algebraic equations, like ENIAC was built only for a special purpose, the computation of artillery tables. By rewiring the ABC electronic computer you could have also computed anything, so you can say that it was Turing complete, if rewiring is allowed. The only difference is that rewiring was simpler in ENIAC, because it had been planned to be easy, so there were special panels where you could alter the connections. Neither ABC nor ENIAC had enough memory to be truly general-purpose, and by the end of the war it was recognized that this was the main limitation for extending the domain of applications, so the ENIAC team proposed ultrasonic delay lines as the solution for a big memory (inspired by the use of delay lines as an analog memory in radars), while von Neumann proposed the use of a cathode ray tube of the kind used in video cameras (iconoscope; this was implemented first in the Manchester computers). Because ENIAC was not really designed as general-purpose, its designers originally did not think about high-capacity memories. On the other hand, John Vincent Atanasoff, the main designer of the ABC computer, has written a very insightful document about the requirements for memories in digital computers, years before ENIAC, where he analyzed all the known possibilities and where he invented the concept of DRAM, but implemented with discrete capacitors. Later, the proposal of von Neumann was also to use a DRAM, but to use a cheaper and more compact iconoscope CRT, instead of discrete capacitors. While the ABC computer was not general-purpose as built, the document written by Atanasoff in 1940, “Computing Machine for the Solution of Large Systems of Linear Algebraic Equations”, demonstrated a much better understanding of the concept of a general-purpose electronic digital computer than the designers of ENIAC would demonstrate before the end of 1944 / beginning of 1945, when they realized that a bigger memory is needed to make a computer suitable for any other applications, i.e. for really making it "general purpose".
• froh 6mo ago
  Zuse Z3 enters the room, relais' kindly rattling "Hrm. I was digital. not electronic as in cathode tubes but definitively digital."
• jamesvzb 6mo ago
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• Gamer_Siniest69 6mo ago
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• ux266478 6mo ago
  For the curious programmers who are wondering what it was like to program ENIAC, a simulator is available: https://www.cs.drexel.edu/~bls96/eniac/simulator.html https://www.cs.drexel.edu/~bls96/eniac/simulator.html And a programming manual: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=8467000 https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=846... It's really got a nice archaic character.
• soyyo 6mo ago
  I find it interesting that, unless I’m mistaken, this was a completely engineering effort. That is, they were not trying to follow the notion of a universal computing device that had already been defined by Turing and Church at the time. They were just trying to build something like a huge programmable calculator, but they ended up building a universal computation device anyway.
• bpoyner 6mo ago
  Reminds me of stumbling across the Harvard Mark I, which is about 1-2 years older, while wandering through the Harvard Science Center (as one does). By far the oldest computer I've seen in person. Seems they moved it since then to the Science and Engineering Complex.
• llimllib 6mo ago
  My alma mater, Ursinus, is a very small school and has few claims to fame; but one of them is that John Mauchly taught there before going to Penn to design ENIAC. Wikipedia puts it bluntly: > Mauchly's teaching career truly began in 1933 at Ursinus College where he was appointed head of the physics department, where he was, in fact, the only staff member.
• hedora 6mo ago
  Arguably, it was the second. The Harvard Mark 1 ran its first program in 1944, but didn’t have branches as we understand them until 1946: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvard_Mark_I https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvard_Mark_I Apparently, you could achieve loops by taping the input program into a physical loop, even in 1944.
  • LeFantome 6mo ago
    Colossus Mark I beat them too: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colossus_computer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colossus_computer
• LeFantome 6mo ago
  Colossus was first: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colossus_computer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colossus_computer
• DaleBiagio 6mo ago
  ENIAC is where the profession of programming was born — and the first programmers were six women: Kay McNulty, Betty Jennings, Betty Snyder, Marlyn Meltzer, Frances Bilas, and Ruth Lichterman. They had to program it by physically rewiring patch cables and flipping switches. There was no programming language, no stored program. The "software" was the hardware configuration itself. It took another decade before FORTRAN (1957) gave programmers a way to write instructions in something resembling human language.
  • LetsGetTechnicl 6mo ago
    Thank you for highlighting the contributions of women in computing, especially at it's inception! That is so easily forgotten or intentionally ignored in the age of the "tech bro"
    • adrian_b 6mo ago
      There were other programmers before those of ENIAC, but they also included women, like Grace Hopper, who later had an important role in the development of programming languages.
      • DaleBiagio 6mo ago
        Hopper's trajectory from the Mark I to FLOW-MATIC to COBOL is one of the great arcs in computing. She had to fight to convince people that programs could be written in English-like words, her colleagues thought the idea was absurd because "computers don't understand English."
    • DaleBiagio 6mo ago
      The ENIAC women's story is especially striking because they were classified as "sub-professional". The hardware was the prestigious work, the programming was considered clerical. That framing took decades to reverse.
  • AnimalMuppet 6mo ago
    Even in the 1950s, my mother worked on a machine that could be programmed in octal, but you could change the instruction set with patch cables.
• imadch 6mo ago
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• JoeDaDude 6mo ago
  For a while I worked at what was then the Sperry Rand Corporation (now Unisys) which had some pride in their heritage as the descendant of the Univac Corporation founded by ENIAC inventors Eckert and Mauchly. In a glass case there was a vacuum tube circuit said to be a memory unit of the original ENIAC. No one seemed to know much about it, casting doubt on the claimed provenance of the device. The tube circuit resembled the ones shown in the photo linked below (although none of those in the photo are from ENIAC). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Women_holding_parts_of_the_first_four_Army_computers.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Women_holding_parts_of_th...
• Finnucane 6mo ago
  "More than 30 meters long, it filled a 9 m by 15 m room and weighed about 30 kilograms." It was a balloon?
• neuromark_cho10 6mo ago
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• deleted 6mo ago
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• AliEveryHour16 6mo ago
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• RaviPatel79689 6mo ago
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• jonjacky 6mo ago
  A newer book, from 2016, ENIAC in Action: Making and Remaking the Modern Computer by Thomas Haigh, Mark Priestly, and Crispin Rope https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262334433/eniac-in-action/ https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262334433/eniac-in-action/ An interesting revelation here is that, although ENIAC was not originally conceived as a stored program computer, it was quite early converted to one. They repurposed a lookup table intended to calculate functions to store instructions instead. Many of the well-known ENIAC calculations, such as Monte Carlo simulations, were programmed in this mode.