Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
ENIAC was a massive machine that weighed more than 30 tons. It used more
than 17,000 vacuum tubes, 70,000 resistors, and 10,000 capacitors. There were no
integrated circuits or printed circuits in those days, so construction involved more
than 5,000,000 hand-soldered joints, according to Wikipedia.
As is common with vacuum tube devices, tube failure was common. In fact,
several tubes burned out every day. A partial solution to this problem was to leave
the computer running twenty-four hours a day (at great cost for electricity con-
sumption). This is because most vacuum tube failures occur when they are first
turned on and are warming up. In 1948, special high-reliability vacuum tubes were
developed, which reduced the frequency of tube failures.
The main designers of ENIAC are the famous computer pioneers John Mauchly
and J. Presper Eckert of the University of Pennsylvania, although many others par-
ticipated in the design and construction.
Many of the technical advances for the ENIAC were patented by Mauchly and
Eckert. After Sperry-Rand acquired these patents, the company began to charge
royalties for computers built using the same features. This led to a momentous
patent violation lawsuit between Sperry-Rand and Honeywell, discussed in later
chapters.
Mauchly visited Atanasoff and witnessed the ABC computer in operation.
There was also correspondence between Mauchly and Atanasoff about the differ-
ences between ABC and the proposed ENIAC. This interaction would play a ma-
jor role in future decades when there were mutual patent lawsuits between Sperry-
Rand and Honeywell.
In 1944, Mauchly and Eckert started the design of a more advanced computer
called the EDVAC. The EDVAC was not finished until 1949, and John von Neu-
mann was part of the final team. As with ENIAC, the EDVAC was aimed at bal-
listics calculations and was funded by the Army's Ballistic Research Laboratory.
Both ENIAC and EDVAC came to the attention of nuclear scientists at Los
Alamos, who realized that computers would play a role in solving complex nuclear
equations. One of these scientists at Los Alamos was John von Neumann. The
notes prepared by von Neumann on the design of EDVAC became world-famous
as the essence of the architecture of future digital computers.
The decade from 1940 to 1949 was heavily influenced by the work of von Neu-
mann, who was a polymath and who made contributions not only in computer ar-
chitecture but also in pure mathematics, nuclear energy, set theory, linear program-
Search WWH ::
Custom Search