Hello. I am called ENIAC. ENIAC stands for Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer. I am the first all-purpose, all electronic digital computer. I am responsible for kicking off the computer industry.
I am an amazingly complex system of circuits. I am made up of 18,000 vacuum tubes, 70,000 resistors, 10,000 capacitors, and 6,000 manual switches. This is quite an achievement, considering that I was completed in 1945.
Today's computer users might be surprised to learn that I have no monitor. In fact, it was years after my introduction before computers made use of monitors. Instead, my output is sent to an IBM card punch. The card punch puts holes into paper cards. From these cards a table of numbers can be automatically printed.
Although I was designed mainly to calculate ballistic trajectories, my first real job was quite different. World War II was over, and the first three atomic bombs had been exploded (at Los Alamos, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki). Work by then had already begun on the Hydrogen bomb. I was called upon to determine if the latest design of the H-bomb was workable.
It was a huge calculation, involving thousands of programming steps and a million punch cards of data. But I made the calculation and found several flaws in the proposed design -- flaws that would have been impossible to find, I am told, without my help. Anyway, the scientists decided to pursue another approach, and, for better or for worse, the first H-bomb was exploded (with the help of another computer) seven years later, in 1952.
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