On February 14, 1946, the government released Eniac from its shroud of secrecy. Two 20-horsepower blowers exhaled cool air so that Eniac wouldn’t melt down. The machine did not boot up until November 1945, when 300 neon lights attached to accumulators lit up a basement room at the Moore School. Looking at the consoles, observers could see a tangle of patch cords that reminded them of a telephone exchange.īut by the time Eniac was completed, the war was over. Its 40 cabinets, each of them nine feet high, were packed with 18,000 vacuum tubes, 10,000 capacitors, 6,000 switches and 1,500 relays. Weighing in at 30 tons, the U-shaped construct filled a 1,500-square-foot room. The original cost estimate of $150,000 would rise to $400,000. What distinguished Eniac from the others was that a working machine performing thousands of calculations a second could be easily reprogrammed for different tasks. Atanasoff, who had plans to build his own huge calculating machine (but never completed the task). In 1941 Mauchly himself had discussed the field with an Iowa State professor named John V. At Bletchley Park in England, cryptographers would oversee the construction of a special-purpose code-breaking machine called Colossus. In late 1939, Harvard professor Howard Aiken was building the Mark 1, a giant calculator. The idea of huge computing machines was in the air at that time.

As chief engineer he was the mainspring of the entire mechanism.” As summarized by Herman Goldstine, a pioneering contemporary, “Eckert’s contribution.exceeded all others. When the Army’s Ordnance Ballistic Research Laboratory approved the project, Eckert became the driving force behind what experts now consider to be the world’s first digital, general-purpose computer.

Mauchly, had circulated some memos about how a powerful new kind of electronic calculator could produce benefits to the war effort in areas like setting munitions trajectories. was a grad student at the Moore School of Engineering (affiliated with the University of Pennsylvania). In the early 1940s John Presper “Pres” Eckert Jr.

It was only when I became a technology writer some years later that I realized that my landlord had invented the computer. It was not until the mid-1970s, when I was in my 20s, that I learned that Gatsbian moniker-I’d write it every month on a rent check for a one-bedroom apartment in the Germantown section of the city. But during all the baby-boomer years I attended schools in the City of Brotherly Love, none of my teachers mentioned J. Philadelphia schoolchildren are drilled on the names of its accomplished citizens.

Heroes of the computer revolution