[W/K] :: Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer

  Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer
       
           (ENIAC) The second general-purpose electronic
          digital computer and an ancestor of most computers in use
          today.  ENIAC was developed by Dr. John Mauchly and
          J. Presper Eckert during World War II at the Moore School of
          the University of Pennsylvania.
       
          In 1940 Dr. John Vincent Atanasoff attended a lecture by
          Mauchly and subsequently agreed to show him his computer, the
          Atanasoff-Berry Computer (ABC), which was built between
          1937-1942.  Mauchly used ideas from the ABC in the design of
          ENIAC, which was started in June 1943 and released publicly in
          1946.
       
          ENIAC was underwritten and its development overseen by
          Lieutenant Herman Goldstine of the U.S. Army Ballistic
          Research Laboratory (BRL).  While the prime motivation for
          constructing the machine was to automate the wartime
          production of firing and bombing tables, the very first
          program run on ENIAC was a highly classified computation
          for Los Alamos.  Later applications included weather
          prediction, cosmic ray studies, wind tunnel design,
          petroleum exploration, and optics.
       
          ENIAC had 20 registers made entirely from vacuum tubes.
          It had no other no memory as we currently understand it.  The
          machine performed an addition in 200 microseconds, a
          multiplication in about three milliseconds, and a division
          in about 30 milliseconds.
       
          John von Neumann, a world-renowned mathematician serving on
          the BRL Scientific Advisory Committee, soon joined the
          developers of ENIAC and made some critical contributions.
          While Mauchly, Eckert and the Penn team continued on the
          technological problems, he, Goldstine, and others took up the
          logical problems.  In 1947, while working on the design for
          the successor machine, EDVAC, von Neumann realized that
          ENIAC's lack of a centralized control unit could be overcome
          to obtain a rudimentary stored program computer.
          Modifications were undertaken, that eventually led to an
          instruction set of 92 "orders".  Von Neumann also proposed
          the fetch-execute cycle.
       
          [R. F. Clippinger, "A Logical Coding System Applied to the
          ENIAC", Ballistic Research Laboratory Report No. 673, Aberdeen
          Proving Ground, MD, September 1948.
          http://ftp.arl.mil/~mike/comphist/48eniac-coding).html">(http://ftp.arl.mil/~mike/comphist/48eniac-coding)].
       
          [H. H. Goldstine, "The Computer from Pascal to von Neumann",
          Princeton University Press, 1972].
       
          [K. Kempf, "Electronic Computers within the Ordnance Corps",
          Aberdeen Proving Ground, MD, 1961.
          http://ftp.arl.mil/~mike/comphist/61ordnance).html">(http://ftp.arl.mil/~mike/comphist/61ordnance)].
       
          [M. H. Weik, "The ENIAC Story", J. American Ordnance Assoc.,
          1961. http://ftp.arl.mil/~mike/comphist/eniac-story.html).html">(http://ftp.arl.mil/~mike/comphist/eniac-story.html)].
       
          (2002-06-03)