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ENIAC lives!

Computers nowadays aren’t a big thing anymore.
We work with them, they process stuff for us and
they’re supposed to make our work easier. But
how did all start? The ENIAC was built in 1947.

Some tech specs about a computer that really was a masterpiece back then:

ENIAC – Tech specs:

Six Operators were programming a computer with these tech specs:


40 parallel working components
approx. 1’830 sqft space needed
approx. 1’500 Relays
approx. 7’200 Diodes
exactly 17’468 electronic tubes
approx. 10’000 capacitors
approx. 59’550 lbs weight
approx. 70’000 resistors
approx. 200’000 work hours needed for completion (done by 50 developers)
cost 486.802,22 US$ (that is now a whopping 6’800’000 US$!)
approx. 5’000’000 manually soldered contacts
approx. 170’000 watts power demand!


 

ENIAC in pictures:

One of the 17’468 tubes that made ENIAC work. Each tube was running at 100kHz.

The room, ENIAC was standing in (about 1830 sqft)

Every algorithm was hard-wired and had to be redone for every new step
The picture shows Elizabeth “Betty” Holberton with her colleague

Ruth Lichterman Teitelbaum (front), Marlyn Wescoff (middle) and Jean Jennings (back)
during Programmation of ENIAC

Jean “Betty” Bartik (left) und Frances Spence (right) during Operation of ENIAC

Ruth Teitelbaum (in der Hocke) uad Marlyn Meltzer at the ENIAC plug-consoles

Kathy Kleiman explaining to the audience, how she found the ENIAC coders

Interesting that ENIAC was able to process 5000 addition, 357 multiplication and 38 division arithmetics per second. That was fast for the time being. ENIAC was able to process complex calculations in 30 seconds where 80 computers (the employees doing the calculations manually were called “computers”!) would have needed 20 hours.

ENIAC is still working (or at least was till April 2016: An own Twitter account (@EniacLives) has some messages in binary format on it. Some were also replies to other Twitter accounts.

If you want to easily read what ENIAC has “spoken”, you can use a Binary-2-ASCII converter: click here

As you can see, this 73 year-old computer is still working and can be surely called the pioneer of all tube-based computers!


October 14, 2018 Netspark - 1594 posts - Member since: May 9th, 2011 No Comments »

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