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  "publishedAt": "2026-03-18T18:00:05.000Z",
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  "tags": [
    "Ieee-history",
    "Eniac",
    "Computing",
    "Computers",
    "History-of-technology",
    "Type-ti",
    "Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer",
    "Moore School of Electrical Engineering",
    "University of Pennsylvania",
    "U.S. Department of War",
    "news release",
    "need for faster computation",
    "human computers",
    "ENIAC operational",
    "UNIVAC I",
    "Integrated circuit",
    "IBM System/360",
    "Programmed Data Processor (PDP-11)",
    "Intel 4004",
    "Cray-1",
    "VAX",
    "IBM PC",
    "World Wide Web",
    "Amazon Web Services",
    "Apple iPad",
    "Industry 4.0",
    "First reprogrammable quantum computer demonstrated",
    "Generative AI boom",
    "ENIAC’s 80th anniversary",
    "John Mauchly",
    "Ballistic Research Laboratory",
    "J. Presper Eckert",
    "Adele Katz Goldstine",
    "difficult",
    "Cambridge",
    "MIT",
    "Princeton",
    "ENIAC in Action: Making and Remaking the Modern Computer",
    "Thomas Haigh",
    "Mark Priestley",
    "Crispin Rope",
    "Judge Earl Richard Larson",
    "Honeywell v. Sperry Rand",
    "computer",
    "John Vincent Atanasoff",
    "Iowa State University",
    "designated ENIAC",
    "paper on the machine",
    "IEEE Annals of the History of Computing",
    "IEEE Xplore Digital Library",
    "The Second Life of ENIAC",
    "history paper on ENIAC",
    "IEEE Technology and Society Magazine",
    "Inspiring Technology: 34 Breakthroughs",
    "Proving Ground: The Untold Story of the Six Women Who Programmed the World’s First Modern Computer",
    "article",
    "The Institute",
    "Kathleen Antonelli",
    "Jean Bartik",
    "Betty Holberton",
    "Marlyn Meltzer",
    "Frances Spence",
    "Ruth Teitelbaum",
    "Mitch Marcus",
    "2006 PhillyVoice article",
    "inducted",
    "Women in Technology International Hall of Fame",
    "Klára Dán von Neumann",
    "John von Neumann",
    "women of ENIAC",
    "IEEE Computer Society",
    "Computer Pioneer Award",
    "PS Academy Arizona",
    "recreated the ENIAC",
    "replica features",
    "recent Communications of the ACM article",
    "Richa Gupta"
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  "textContent": "\n\n\n\nHappy 80th anniversary, ENIAC! The Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer, the first large-scale, general-purpose, programmable electronic digital computer, helped shape our world.\n\nOn 15 February 1946, ENIAC—developed in the Moore School of Electrical Engineering at the University of Pennsylvania, in Philadelphia—was publicly demonstrated for the first time. Although primitive by today’s standards, ENIAC’s purely electronic design and programmability were breakthroughs in computing at the time. ENIAC made high-speed, general-purpose computing practicable and laid the foundation for today’s machines.\n\nOn the eve of its unveiling, the U.S. Department of War issued a news release hailing it as a new machine “expected to revolutionize the mathematics of engineering and change many of our industrial design methods.” Without a doubt, electronic computers have transformed engineering and mathematics, as well as practically every other domain, including politics and spirituality.\n\nENIAC’s success ushered the modern computing industry and laid the foundation for today’s digital economy. During the past eight decades, computing has grown from a niche scientific endeavor into an engine of economic growth, the backbone of billion-dollar enterprises, and a catalyst for global innovation. Computing has led to a chain of innovations and developments such as stored programs, semiconductor electronics, integrated circuits, networking, software, the Internet, and distributed large-scale systems.\n\n## Inside the ENIAC\n\nThe motivation for developing ENIAC was the need for faster computation during World War II. The U.S. military wanted to produce extensive artillery firing tables for field gunners to quickly determine settings for a specific weapon, a target, and conditions. Calculating the tables by hand took “human computers” several days, and the available mechanical machines were far too slow to meet the demand.\n\n### 80 Years of Electronic Computer Milestones\n\n\n\n\n#### 1946\n\nENIAC operational\n\nBirth of electronic computing\n\n#### 1951\n\nUNIVAC I\n\nStart of commercial computing\n\n#### 1958\n\nIntegrated circuit\n\nFoundation for modern computer hardware\n\n#### 1964\n\nIBM System/360\n\nPopular mainframe computer\n\n#### 1970\n\nProgrammed Data Processor (PDP-11)\n\nPopular 16-bit minicomputer\n\n#### 1971\n\nIntel 4004\n\nBeginning of the microprocessor and microcomputer era\n\n#### 1975\n\nCray-1\n\nFirst supercomputer\n\n#### 1977\n\nVAX\n\nPopular 32-bit minicomputer\n\n#### 1981\n\nIBM PC\n\nPersonal and small-business computing\n\n#### 1989\n\nWorld Wide Web\n\nDigital communication, interaction, and transaction (e-commerce)\n\n#### 2002\n\nAmazon Web Services\n\nBeginning of the cloud computing revolution\n\n#### 2010\n\nApple iPad\n\nHandheld computer/tablet\n\n#### 2010\n\nIndustry 4.0\n\nDelivered real-time decision-making, smart manufacturing, and logistics\n\n#### 2016\n\nFirst reprogrammable quantum computer demonstrated\n\nIgnited interest in quantum computing\n\n#### 2023\n\nGenerative AI boom\n\nWidespread use of GenAI by individuals, businesses, and academia\n\n#### 2026\n\nENIAC’s 80th anniversary\n\n80 years of computing evolution\n\n###\n\n\n\n\nIn 1942 John Mauchly, an associate professor of electrical engineering at Penn’s Moore School, suggested using vacuum tubes to speed up computer calculations. Following up on his theory, the U.S. Army Ballistic Research Laboratory, which was responsible for providing artillery settings to soldiers in the field, commissioned Mauchly and his colleagues J. Presper Eckert and Adele Katz Goldstine, to work on a new high-speed computer. Eckert was a lab instructor at Moore, and Goldstine became one of ENIAC’s programmers. It took them a year to design ENIAC and 18 months to build it.\n\nThe computer contained about 18,000 vacuum tubes, which were cooled by 80 air blowers. More than 30 meters long, it filled a 9 m by 15 m room and weighed about 30 kilograms. It consumed as much electricity as a small town.\n\nProgramming the machine was difficult. ENIAC did not have stored programs, so to reprogram the machine, operators manually reconfigured cables with switches and plugboards, a process that took several days.\n\nBy the 1950s, large universities either had acquired or built their own machines to rival ENIAC. The schools included Cambridge (EDSAC), MIT (Whirlwind), and Princeton (IAS). Researchers used the computers to model physical phenomena, solve mathematical problems, and perform simulations.\n\nAfter almost nine years of operation, ENIAC officially was decommissioned on 2 October 1955.\n\nENIAC in Action: Making and Remaking the Modern Computer, a book by Thomas Haigh, Mark Priestley, and Crispin Rope,__ describes the design, construction, and testing processes and dives into its afterlife use. The book also outlines the complex relationship between ENIAC and its designers, as well as the revolutionary approaches to computer architecture.\n\nIn the early 1970s, there was a controversy over who invented the electronic computer and who would be assigned the patent. In 1973 Judge Earl Richard Larson of U.S. District Court in Minnesota ruled in the Honeywell v. Sperry Rand case that Eckert and Mauchly did not invent the automatic electronic digital computer but instead had derived their subject matter from a computer prototyped in 1939 by John Vincent Atanasoff and Clifford Berry at Iowa State College (now Iowa State University). The ruling granted Atanasoff legal recognition as the inventor of the first electronic digital computer.\n\n## IEEE’s ENIAC Milestone\n\nIn 1987 IEEE designated ENIAC as an IEEE Milestone, citing it as “a major advance in the history of computing” and saying the machine “established the practicality of large-scale electronic digital computers and strongly influenced the development of the modern, stored-program, general-purpose computer.”\n\nThe commemorative Milestone plaque is displayed at the Moore School, by the entrance to the classroom where ENIAC was built.\n\n###\n\n\n\n\n“The ENIAC legacy heralded the computer age, transforming not only science and industry but also education, research, and human communication and interaction.”\n\n###\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nA paper on the machine, published in 1996 in IEEE Annals of the History of Computing and available in the IEEE Xplore Digital Library, is a valuable source of technical information.\n\n“The Second Life of ENIAC _,”_ an article published in the annals in 2006, covers a lesser-known chapter in the machine’s history, about how it evolved from a static system—configured and reconfigured through laborious cable plugging—into a precursor of today’s stored-program computers.\n\nA classic history paper on ENIAC was published in the December 1995 IEEE Technology and Society Magazine.\n\nThe IEEE Inspiring Technology: 34 Breakthroughs book, published in 2023, features an ENIAC chapter.\n\n## The women behind ENIAC\n\nOne of the most remarkable aspects of the ENIAC story is the pivotal role women played, according to the book Proving Ground: The Untold Story of the Six Women Who Programmed the World’s First Modern Computer _,_ highlighted in an article in The Institute. There were no “programmers” at that time; only schematics existed for the computer. Six women, known as the ENIAC 6, became the machine’s first programmers.\n\nThe ENIAC 6 were Kathleen Antonelli, Jean Bartik, Betty Holberton, Marlyn Meltzer, Frances Spence, and Ruth Teitelbaum.\n\n“These six women found out what it took to run this computer, and they really did incredible things,” a Penn professor, Mitch Marcus, said in a 2006 PhillyVoice article. Marcus teaches in Penn’s computer and information science department.\n\nIn 1997 all six female programmers were inducted into the Women in Technology International Hall of Fame, in Los Angeles.\n\nTwo other women contributed to the programming. Goldstine wrote ENIAC’s five-volume manual, and Klára Dán von Neumann, wife of John von Neumann, helped train the programmers and debug and verify their code.\n\nTo honor the women of ENIAC, the IEEE Computer Society established the annual Computer Pioneer Award in 1981. Eckert and Mauchly were among the award’s first recipients. In 2008 Bartik was honored with the award. Nominations are open to all professionals, regardless of gender.\n\n## An ENIAC replica\n\nLast year a group of 80 autistic students, ages 12 to 16, from PS Academy Arizona, in Gilbert, recreated the ENIAC using 22,000 custom parts. It took the students almost six months to assemble.\n\nA ceremony was held in January to display their creation. The full-scale replica features actual-size panels made from layered cardboard and wood. Although all electronic components are simulated, they are not electrically active. The machine, illuminated by hundreds of LEDs, is accompanied by a soundtrack that simulates the deep hum of ENIAC’s transformers and the rhythmic clicking of relays.\n\n****\n\n###\n\n\n\n\n###\n\n\n\n\n“Every major unit, accumulators, function tables, initiator, and master programmer is present and placed exactly where it was on the original machine,” Tom Burick, the teacher who mentored the project, said at the ceremony.\n\nThe replica, still on display at the school, is expected to be moved to a more permanent spot in the near future.\n\n## ENIAC’s legacy\n\nENIAC’s significance is both technical and symbolic. Technically, it marks the beginning of the chain of innovations that created today’s computational infrastructure. Symbolically, it made governments, militaries, universities, and industry view computation as a tool for improvement and for innovative applications that had previously been impossible. It marked a tectonic shift in the way humans approach problem-solving, modeling, and scientific reasoning.\n\nThe ENIAC legacy heralded the computer age, transforming not only science and industry but also education, research, and human communication and interaction.\n\nAs Eckert is reported to have said, “There are two epochs in computer history: Before ENIAC and After ENIAC.”\n\n## Coevolution of programming languages\n\nThe remarkable evolution of computer hardware during the past 80 years has been sparked by advances in programming languages—the essential drivers of computing.\n\nFrom the manual rewiring of ENIAC to the orchestration of intelligent, distributed systems, programming languages have steadily evolved to make computers more powerful, expressive, and accessible.\n\n### Lessons From Computing’s Remarkable Journey\n\n\n\n\nComputing history teaches us that flexibility, accessibility, collaboration, sound governance, and forward thinking are essential for sustained technological progress. In a recent Communications of the ACM article, Richa Gupta identified four historic shifts that led to computing’s rapid, transformative progress:\n\n  1. Programmable machines taught us that flexibility is key; technologies that adapt and are repurposed scale better.\n  2. The Internet showed that connection and standard protocols drive explosive growth but also bring new risks such as data security issues, invasion of privacy, and misuse.\n  3. Personal computers illustrated that accessibility and usability matter more than raw power. When nonexperts can use a tool easily, adoption rises.\n  4. The open-source movement revealed that collaborative innovation accelerates growth and helps spot problems early.\n\n\n\n## Predictions for computing in the decades ahead\n\nThe evolution of computing will continue along multiple trajectories, with the emphasis moving from generalization to specialization (for AI, graphics, security, and networking), from monolithic system design to modular integration, and from performance-centric metrics alone to energy efficiency and sustainability as primary objectives.\n\nIncreasingly, security will be built into hardware by design. Computing paradigms will expand beyond traditional deterministic models to embrace probabilistic, approximate, and hybrid approaches for certain tasks.\n\nThose developments will usher in a new era of computing and a new class of applications.",
  "title": "ENIAC, the First General-Purpose Digital Computer, Turns 80"
}