Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
1
From Military to Marketplace
"If you don't want to be replaced by a computer, don't act like one."
- Arno Penzias, computer scientist
As shall be seen, research and development by the military-industrial complex of the Un-
ited States has played a major role in various aspects of computer development throughout
the decades. This was never so much the case, however, as in the creation of the very first
major computer, the ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer).
Funded by the U.S. Army in 1943 and developed at a cost of $500,000 by John Mauchly
and J. Presper Eckert at the University of Pennsylvania's Moore School of Electrical Engin-
eering, the ENIAC was a cumbersome, massive machine, but also a technological wonder at
the time of its public debut in 1946.
Consider the heft: 17,468 vacuum tubes, 7,200 crystal diodes, 1,500 relays, 70,000
resistors, 10,000 capacitors and around 5 million hand-soldered joints. Taking up 1,800
square feet, the ENIAC weighed more than 27 tons. (Writing in 2004 for the IEEE
Annals
of the History of Computing
, David Allen Grier, a technology historian at George Mason
University, said the machine was best described "as a collection of electronic adding ma-
chines and other arithmetic units, which were originally controlled by a web of large elec-
trical cables.") Today, UPenn's School of Engineering and Applied Science has on display
four of the original 40 panels of the ENIAC.
Input was via IBM card reader, and output via IBM card punch. Once the painstaking
job of input was finished, actual computing took place at what seemed at the time like warp-
speed. A multiplication of a 10-digit number by a single-digit number took 1400 micro-
seconds (714 per second), a 10- by 10-digit multiplication took 2800 microseconds (357
per second), and so forth. A division or square root problem took approximately 28,600 mi-
croseconds (35 per second). These speeds were no less than one thousand times faster than
those offered by the previous generation of electro-mechanical calculator machines. This
quantum leap in computing power has never since been matched with reference to the intro-
duction of any single new machine.
Incorporating recursive functions and lambda calculus, ENIAC was "Turing complete,"
meaning that it was governed by a firm set of data-manipulation rules which, followed in se-
quence, would produce the results for any requested calculation performed on arbitrary data.
(The name "Turing complete" came from British mathematician and computer scientist Alan
Turing, whose ideas led to its conception.) Notably, the machine could be programmed to
perform sequences of what at the time were extremely complex operations, including loops,
branches, and subroutines.
