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ENIAC
Electronic Numerical Integration and Calculator (ENIAC) was one of the first computers ever created. It was
created to calculate the path of projectiles in World War 2. It could do, in thirty seconds, what a skilled human
could do in over twenty hours. Current mechanical calculators, at the time, were not much better. During the
Second
World War, the Ballistic Research Laboratory (BRL) could not calculate the paths of projectiles fast enough to
provide them to the soldiers on the field when they needed it. Since the BRL was running into trouble they pursued
the help of John Mauchly, who in 1942 suggested using vacuum tubes to speed up calculations to an unknown level at
that time.
Lt. Herman Goldstine of the BRL looked into this technology, and in 1943 BRL enlisted John Mauchly and
his colleague J. Presper Eckert to build their new high-speed computer. It took approximately one year to design
ENIAC and another eighteen months to build it and by November of 1945 it was completed, but the war was over.
Although the war was over, ENIAC was still put to work in the Cold War doing calculations for the design of the
Hydrogen Bomb. ENIAC was a thousand times faster than its predecessors. In one second the ENIAC could calculate
5000 additions, 357 multiplications and 38 divisions.
The present CPU's of our time, such as the Intelİ Pentium
4 and AMDİ Athlon Thunderbird-C processors, are over a thousand times more powerful than ENIAC. ENIAC did have
a few drawbacks, such as its size. It weighed thirty tons and occupied fifteen hundred square feet, and contained
seventeen thousand vacuum tubes that consumed a massive amount of energy and produced a vast amount of heat.
Along with that, reprogramming ENIAC was a horrendous task. To reprogram ENIAC a person must basically rewire it,
which could take many days for a team of specialists to reprogram.
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