ENIAC
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History of Computers: The
ENIAC was a large-scale, general purpose digital electronic computer.
Built out of some 17,468 electronic vacuum tubes, ENIAC was in its time
the largest single electronic apparatus in the world. There were two
fundamental technical innovations in the ENIAC. The first had to do with
combining very diverse technical components and design ideas into a
single system that could perform 5,000 additions and 300 multiplications
per second. Although slow by today's standards - current microprocessors
perform 100 million additions per second - this was two to three orders
of magnitude (100 to 1,000 times) faster than existing mechanical
computers or calculators. This
increase in speed was largely due to the fact that the ENIAC used vacuum
tubes instead of switches and relays. However to pay off for all this
technology, the ENIAC was enormous. It occupied over 1,500 square feet,
contained about 18,000 vacuum tubes, weighed more than 30 tons! and
consumed about 180,000 watts of electrical power. The
ENIAC was divided into thirty autonomous units, twenty of which were
called accumulators. Each accumulator was a high-speed ten-digit adding
machine that could also store the results of its calculations. The ENIAC
was a decimal machine. The
ENIAC was controlled through a train of electronic pulses. Several other
units rounded the basic functions of the ENIAC. It had punched card I/O,
1 multiplier, 1 divider/square rooter and also a quick-access (.0002
seconds) read write register storage. References: |
