The ENIAC 1

The ENIAC 1 was created by John Mauchley and J. Presper Eckert in 1646. ENIAC stands for Electronic Numerical Integrator And Calculator. It took a year and a half to build and half a million dollars. The ENIAC used a lot of power. It took up a ton of space and weighed 30 tons. The ENIAC was created to help win the war. It helped to calculate things including the angle of the guns, wind speed, direction of wind, temperature and humidity. The main component of the ENIAC was the vacuum tubes. Originally the tubes were switches but they switched to vacuum tubes. These tubes kept the ENIAC running. They were quiet and fast. The ENIAC was finally shut down on October 2, 1955. The ENIAC was a major part of the invention of the computer.

Vacuum Tubes in the ENIAC

The ENIAC used vacuum tubes instead of switches. The vacuum tubes were much more fragile, much more expensive, and used more power than the switches but they were quieter and faster then the switches. One of the biggest problem with the vacuum tubes was that 90% of the ENIAC's "down- time" was because of burn-outs. The burn-outs were difficult to locate and hard to replace. In one year about 19,000 vacuums had to be replaced. The average per day was about 50 vacuum tubes per day.

http://www.comsci.us/history/gen1.html

Why was the ENIAC created?

The ENIAC was create for a reason. This reason was to help win the war. Many tables had to be made to show different things about different guns. These things include the angle of the gun, wind speed, direction of the wind, temperature, and humidity. These things and more had to be considered when the US joined the war. Mauchley and Eckert chose to help with these charts by creating a computing device. The ENIAC made the computations for these table much more accurate.

http://ei.cs.vt.edu/~history/ENIAC.Richey.HTML

Introduction to Eckert and Mauchly

August 21, 08

John Mauchley and J. Presper Eckert created the ENIAC I in 1946. ENIAC I stands for Electronic Numerical Integrator And Calculator. The team took a year to design the ENIAC I. After the design for the ENIAC I, the team took 18 months and 500,000 dollars to build it. The ENIAC I covered 1,800 squared feet of floor space and weighed 30 tons. It used 160 kilowatts of electrical power to operate. The ENIAC was 1,000 times faster than any other calculating device. The speed of the calculations that it could make were incredible: 5,000 addition problems, 357 multiplication problems, or 38 division problems in one second. Although the calculations speed was extremely fast, the reprogramming speed was not. It could take as long as a week to change the programming of the ENIAC; it also took hours of maintenance. In 1946, Eckert and Mauchly created the Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation. Three years later their company came out with the BINAC computer. In 1980, Eckert and Mauchly received the IEEE Computer Society Pioneer Award. On October 2, 1955, the ENIAC was shut off.

http://inventors.about.com/library/weekly/aa060298.htm