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