Sunday, March 12, 2017

What about world's first electronic general-purpose digital Computer


ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer

It was the world's first electronic general-purpose digital computer and with electronic memory. Introduced on Feb. 14, 1946

The ENIAC was invented by J. Presper Eckert and John Mauchly at the University of Pennsylvania. It occupied about 1,800 square feet and used about 18,000 vacuum tubes, weighing almost 50 tons. It was just a large collection of arithmetic machines, which had programs hardcoded into the machines with function tables that each contained 1200 ten way switches. Within microseconds was able to calculate numbers. It was Turing-complete and could solve "a large class of numerical problems" through reprogramming. Programming was done in machine language by plugging wires into a patch panel and the punch cards were storage.magnetic drum also referred to as a drum, is a metal cylinder coated with magnetic iron-oxide material on which data and programs were stored (Memory).