ENIAC Marks 50 Years

1996 marked the 50th anniversary of the ENIAC computer, the first large-scale general purpose
electronic computer. Built at the University of Pennsylvania's Moore School of Electrical Engineering,
the ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator And Computer) was the worlds first electronic digital
computer that used vacuum tubes for switching circuits rather than mechanical relays The ENIAC was
a monster. It's thirty separate units plus power supply and forced-air cooling, weighed over thirty tons.
The 19,000 vacuum tubes, 1,500 relays, and hundreds of thousands of resistors, capacitors, and
inductors consumed almost 20 kilowatts of electrical power.

The ENIAC could differentiate the sign of a number, compare quantities for equality, add, subtract,
multiply, and divide.  A maximum of twenty 10-digit decimal numbers could be stored by the ENIAC.
The ENIAC was completed too late for the war effort, but the first major problem it had to solve was
related to the design of atomic weapons. It took the ENIAC only 2 hours to solve a problem that
would have taken 100 men a year to complete

ENIAC-on-a-Chip

A group of students at the Department of Electrical  Engineering have designed ENIAC
(TM)-on-a-Chip This was done as part of the ENIAC 50th Anniversary Celebration.

From Bug Bytes, newsletter of the Treasure Valley-Boise User Group, via CEBUG Chronicle, May
1998, via The Commodore Information Center web site (http://home.att.net/~rmestel/commodore.html)