The ENIAC was first developed back in 1949 and it took the world by storm. Originally, it was built to solve problems that would ordinarily take several months or years to figure out. This is why some of us use computers today but ENIAC was build with a single purpose.
That purpose was to be the workhorse for the scientific problems of the entire nation. The Military were the first people who used this for their own needs, which benefited the nation in some huge ways. Even today, most of our up and coming technology is designed for the military first and then it is redesigned for the public.
This system actually was used to compute the firing tables for White Sands missile range from 1949 until it was replaced in 1957. This allowed the military to synchronize the lift off the missiles should it be deemed necessary. That was a huge step in military history for the United States at least on a technological level.
ENIAC was a huge machine that used nineteen thousand vacuum tubes and took up a whopping fifteen thousand square feet of floor space. It weighted nearly thirst tons, making it one of the largest machines of the time. It was considered the greatest scientific invention up to this point because it did in two hours what it usually took a team of one hundred engineers working normally for a period of a year to do. That made it almost a miracle in some people’s eyes and people got excited about this emerging technology.
ENIAC could make five thousand additions in seconds, which seemed very fast, by today’s standards that is extremely slow. Most computers today do millions of additions per second in comparison. That is a huge difference as any one can plainly see.
So what made ENIAC run? That task took many people to complete and took hours to set up. The people completing the task used board, plus and wires to program the desired commands into the colossal machine. They also has to input the numbers by turning tons of dials until the matched the correct numbers, much like one has to do on a combination lock.
In 1957, ENIAC was replaced with two more computers who were even more powerful then their predecessor. These two new super computers were called EVAC and ORDVAC.
In reality where computer were first invented as problem solvers, today’s computers are still used for problem solving but we modern day users use our computers for everything it seems.
