THE INVENTION OF THE
COMPUTER
The earliest electronic computers
were not “personal” in any way: They were enormous and hugely expensive, and
they required a team of engineers and other specialists to keep them running.
One of the first and most famous of these, the Electronic Numerical Integrator
Analyzer and Computer (ENIAC), ENIAC was conceived and designed by John Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert of
the University of Pennsylvania to
do ballistics calculations for the U.S. military during World War II. ENIAC cost $500,000, weighed 30 tons and took up nearly
2,000 square feet of floor space. On the outside, ENIAC was covered in a tangle
of cables, hundreds of blinking lights and nearly 6,000 mechanical switches
that its operators used to tell it what to do. On the inside, almost 18,000
vacuum tubes carried electrical signals from one part of the machine to another.
