The First Computer

THE DAILY FED

The First Computer

ENIAC was no laptop. Its thirty separate units, power supply and cooling equipment weighed over 30 tons. It housed 19,000 vacuum tubes, 1,500 relays, hundreds of thousands of resistors, capacitors, and inductors, and consumed almost 200 kilowatts of power.

A recent ceremony at Aberdeen brought together 33 of the pioneers who created ENIAC for a celebration of the Army's 50-year role in the computer revolution. Parts of the Army's Ballistic Research Laboratory team that developed ENIAC later went on to help expand the Defense Department's ARPANET, which eventually developed into the Internet.

ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer) was originally developed to calculate World War II ballistic missile trajectory tables. It was first used, however, to solve an important problem for the Manhattan Project. Later ENIAC was applied to weather predictions, cosmic ray studies, wind-tunnel design, and other scientific uses.

The Army Research Laboratory at Aberdeen, which includes elements of the former Ballistics Research Laboratory, is now one of four centers for the DoD High Performance Computing program. The computing capability at the center today is over one hundred million times that of ENIAC. ENIAC is now dispersed throughout the world among National Science Foundation exhibits.