Amazing ENIAC Computer Facts For Your Kids To Know

Between 1943 and 1946, the program ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator And Computer) had been a popular computer.

John Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert Jr. (a grad student) collaborated on the design of this modern computer. Several tubes, 7,300 diodes, and miles of cable were used to construct this general-purpose computer.

The first computer occupied 1,900 sq ft (176 sq m) of space, the equivalent of a huge room. Although mechanical computing machines have existed since Archimedes' time, the modern computer era for the first computers of the present times began in the 1930s and 1940s.

Read on to know more about the history of this marvel of engineering which was used for complex calculations. After reading about the programmers who designed the ENIAC, also check facts about what is ENIAC computer and who invented ENIAC computer?

History Of ENIAC Computer

The history of computers is complicated, and numerous machines have been dubbed the first computer. The Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer, ENIAC's assertion is that it was much more customizable than prior computers.

Since the first computer was made of vacuum tubes, it was prone to failure. This entailed somebody having to locate the failed tube (not a simple task), remove the bad tube, and replace it with a working tube.

It was tough to create computer programs. It could take many days or even weeks to get the computer ready for a single piece of software. This was due to the fact that programming was done by pulling wires from one location to another. This was not difficult for small programs, but it was quite difficult for huge programs.

Before 1948, when a particular sort of memory (named Read-Only Memory (ROM) since the computer would receive but not create it) was created, programming was done by pulling wires. Then, instead of taking days, programming was done using switches, which took only hours.

The program ENIAC was originally intended to print shooting charts for US Army artillery, however, the war ended before it had been finished.

ENIAC answered in 20 seconds when asked if it was possible to build a hydrogen bomb. Pi to 2000 decimal places took program ENIAC 70 hours to calculate.

A current computer with a 2x2 cm CPU is far faster than the ENIAC, which took up an entire room. A modern computer, for example, can calculate pi to a million (1 000 000) decimal places in around 10 seconds.

Herman Goldstine, the ENIAC administrator and supervisor, made available copies of the First Draft to a number of government and educational institutions, igniting a great deal of interest in the development of the next generation of digital computer systems, such as the Electronic Delay Storage Automatic Calculator at Cambridge university.

As of October 2014, the US Army Field Artillery Center in Fort Sill had acquired seven ENIAC panels that had previously been kept in Texas.

Features Of ENIAC Computer

ENIAC took up 40 x 52 ft (12.1 x 15.7 m) of space and weighed 66,138 lb (30 MT) when fully operating.

The 40 panels were organized in a U-shape that stretched 80 ft (24.2 m) long in the front, as well as the 18,000 vacuum tubes needed were more than 20 times the entire number of vacuum tubes used by all systems aboard a wartime B-29 bomber.

ENIAC had 510,000 soldered connections, 72,000 resistors, and 12,000 capacitors in its circuits. ENIAC consumed 140 kilowatts of electricity and had its own dedicated power connections.

ENIAC's operating features included math, storage, and control aspects. 20 accumulators for adding and subtracting, a multiplication, a combination divider, and a square rooter are all concerned with arithmetic operations. The memory elements were made up of two parts: 20 ten-digit accumulators and 5,000 switches and wires on the functional tables, chargers, and constant transmitters.

The job titles programmer and operator have not been initially thought to be suitable for women. The labor scarcity caused by World War II aided women's entry into the workforce.  Nevertheless, this profession was not regarded as respectable, and women were brought in to free up males for more specialized jobs.

Betty Holberton went on to work with Jean Jennings on the first commercial electronic computers, the UNIVAC and the BINAC and helped build the first generative programming system (SORT/MERGE).

To aid boost Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer, ENIAC's, processing capability, McNulty devised the usage of subroutines.

*We've been unable to source an image of the ENIAC computer and have used an image of a modern computer instead. If you are able to provide us with a royalty-free image of the ENIAC computer, we would be happy to credit you. Please contact us at hello@kidadl.com

Uses Of Eniac Computer

The ENIAC was built and transferred to the army's Aberdeen Proving Ground in Aberdeen after completion. It made firing tables for the military, which were used to accurately fire weapons at specific trajectories to hit targets.

Weather prediction, atomic-energy calculations, cosmic-ray investigations, thermal ignition, random-number studies, wind-tunnel design, and other scientific applications were among the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer (ENIAC's) applications. It should be remembered that until 1951, no electrical computers were used to solve commercial problems.

With its ability to compute math at breakneck speed, the ENIAC provided scientists with a tool unlike any other electronic calculator before it. The ballistics computation, which took 12 hours on a hand calculator before, could now be completed in 30 seconds.

This means that the ENIAC was 1,440 times faster. Calculation-intensive research moved in hitherto unexplored avenues as a result of the concomitant dramatic drop in computing costs.

Properties Of Eniac Computer

In 1945, the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer (ENIAC) became the first programmed, electronic, overall digital computer. It was completed and could reprogram to tackle a vast class of numerical problems.

While ENIAC was created for the US Army's Ballistic Research Laboratory (which eventually formed part of the Army Research Laboratory) to calculate artillery firing tables, its first application had been researching the thermonuclear weapon's practicality.

ENIAC could've been programmed to carry out sophisticated processes such as loops, branches, and subroutines.

ENIAC, on the other hand, was merely a vast collection of arithmetic computers that had programs set up into the machine through a mix of plugboard wiring and three portable function tables, rather than the stored-program computers that exist today (containing 1200 ten-way switches each).

Because of the design freeze in 1943, some features that would later become well-developed, such as the capacity to store a program, were left out of the computer design. Eckert and John Mauchly began plans for a new design that would be both easier and more efficient, later dubbed the EDVAC.

In 1944, Eckert published a description of a memory unit (the mercury delay line) that could store both data and programs. John von Neumann, who'd been working on the EDVAC as a consultant for the Moore School, attended Moore School meetings where the stored program notion was discussed.

Von Neumann drafted an incomplete set of notes (First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC) that were meant to be used as an internal memorandum, summarizing, expanding, and couching the concepts made in the discussions in a formal logical language.

It ran at 1,000 times the speed of an electromechanical machine, and its computing capacity, along with general-purpose programmability, piqued the interest of scientists and manufacturers alike.

ENIAC's combination of power and fully programmable allowed for hundreds more question solutions, as it calculated a trajectory in 30 seconds that would have taken a human up to 10 hours to calculate.

The first programmers came from a group of approximately 180 women who worked as computers at the University of Pennsylvania's Moore School of Electrical Engineering. Computers' role was to generate numeric results from mathematical formulas required for a scientific investigation or an engineering project.

Here at Kidadl, we have carefully created lots of interesting family-friendly facts for everyone to enjoy! If you liked our suggestions for Eniac computer then why not take a look at 57 must know computer facts that all computer users will adore, or name your PC day: an occasion to honor & label our computers.