ENIAC - 1946

In 1943 John Mauchley sought funding from the U.S. military
to build an "electronic" computer.
As they (the military) were interested in mechanical calculators for such imperative
matters as artillery trajectory calculations, they accepted his proposal.
By the time the project was completed in 1946 the war was over, and it was
 too late for the original purpose. But the progress was made.

ENIAC had -
18,000 vacuum tubes,
1500 relays,
weighed 30 tons
and used 140 kilowatts of power.

(ENIAC had 20 registers, each could hold a 10 digit number.
It was programmed by setting up 6000 multiposition switches,
and connecting sockets to a virtual forest of jumper cables.)

There have been many other key developments, and among them
some stand out for one reason or another.
Often a huge step is, in Neil Armstrong's words,
"a small step for (a) man",
but considering the work input for the likes of ENIAC and Collosus,
I doubt that the people concerned actually felt that way.
When Eckert & Mauchley filed for patent after building ENIAC,
they obviously held strong opinions.

 

 

1949 - Genius

Another who worked on the ENIAC was John Von Neumann, who developed the IAS machine.  This one man accomplished more than most of us realise, and is worthy of special note here.

He was, to quote Andrew S. Tanenbaum 1"a genius in the same league as 
Leonardo Da Vinci.
He spoke many languages, was an expert in the physical sciences and mathematics,
and had total recall of everything he ever heard saw or read.".

John Von Neumann saw that programming with switches and cables was
far too tedious and slow, and inflexible.  Seeing that the required program
could be represented in digital form, he designed the first Stored Program Computer.
Each digit in a relay computer was represented by 10 vacuum tubes - 1 on and 9 off.
But Von Neumann saw that this could also be done using binary arithmetic.
This might seem basic to us, but it was completely new thinking then.
The basic design which he first described is now known as a Von Neumann Machine...


von neumann machine
The IAS machine, known as a von Neumann machine, was used in EDSAC,
the first stored program computer.Now, 50 years later, his design is still the basis for most digital computers!
Exerpts from The Internet Index Number 2
Inspired by "Harper's Index"3

94

2 August 1994
Number of electronic mail messages received by the White House since last summer: 200,000
Number of prosecutions for sending threats to President Clinton by electronic mail: 1
Percentage of Web survey respondents over 40 years of age: 10
Number of companies registered on the Internet in April, 1994: 14,726
Number of bytes on the NSFNET backbone in June, 1994: 15 trillion
Percentage increase from June, 1993: 114

Number of bytes of World Wide Web traffic in June, 1994: 946 billion
Percentage increase from June, 1993: 2500

Number of America Online subscribers in June, 1994: 900,000
Number of Internet hosts in June, 1994: approximately 3.2 million
Number of packets on the NSFNET backbone in June, 1994: 75 billion
Number of voice mail messages left in 1993: 12 billion
Number of cities with real-time highway traffic photos available on the Internet: 1
Number of accesses in one week to one of NASA's Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 servers: 340,000

First public library to offer free access to the Internet: Seattle Public Library

© 1999 db jones Pentach Pages wg new zealand
Please feel free to quote or use (& incl. ref., - also ps. observe others rights!), but to Alter or Paraphrase, or Reproduce for distribution, please ask me.....