The future of technology is so predominant that we seldom reflect on the history of computing, and what sparked its development in the first place.
Electronics over mechanics, when the computer became ballistic
By Mary E. Shacklett
Published: October, 2006
The future of technology is so predominant that we seldom reflect on the history of computing, and what sparked its development in the first place.
The ENIAC computer was developed over 50 years ago at the University of Pennsylvania as part of the WWII wartime effort. ENIAC, which stood for Electronic Numerical Integrator and Calculator, was 150 feet wide and contained over 17,000 vacuum tubes. It was gargantuan by today’s standards, and did not even possess a stored memory concept—but it paved the way for computers to become strategic tools that dramatically shortened the amount of time it took to get tasks done.
The World War II challenge that ENIAC addressed was in ballistics. Artillery designs during the war were changing constantly and dramatically, as were the patterns of warfare. Whenever changes occurred, corresponding revisions were required in ballistics firing tables and their ballistics trajectories. When the North African campaign arose in 1943, the Army was confronted with an entirely different terrain than it was accustomed and needed a revised set of firing tables. For most of the war, these ballistics tables’ calculations were programmed by hand. It took approximately 20 hours of desktop calculations at that time to produce a single trajectory and 15 minutes when a mechanical differential analyzer was employed.
The Army contracted with the University of Pennsylvania’s Moore School of Electrical Engineering for the development of a computing device that would eliminate the backlog of firing table computations by speeding the calculation process. This contract commenced in 1943 with a grant of $61,000. By the end of the war, the total U.S. Army investment in ENIAC research was nearly $500,000.
Code-named Project PX, the ENIAC design and build unfolded component by component.
In 1944, a cycling unit and an accumulator were constructed. An initiating unit, function tables, a divider and a square root unit were developed in 1945. Final assembly of the computer occurred in the fall of 1945. Once in operation, the ENIAC performed a ballistics trajectory calculation in the startling time of 30 seconds, which was a major breakthrough for the time.
The ENIAC did not have any central memory unit, nor did it contain software. Instead, storage was localized within functioning units of the computer. The idea was to attain computing speed by eliminating mechanical components while introducing electronic processing. The only mechanical units connected to the computer were an IBM card reader for input and a card punch for output. Without software, programming instructions were created by manually setting up switches and cable connections, and varying them to create the required patterns of instructions. Coaxial cables carried instructions and data from one functioning unit of the computer to the next.
As it turned out, the ENIAC was too late to impact the war effort, but it wound up contributing something far greater to the country by becoming the foundation for the modern computer industry.
The ENIAC project gave birth to concepts such as gates, buffers and storage devices. After the war, ENIAC continued to compute ballistics tables and work on atomic energy problems at the Aberdeen Proving Grounds. The unit was enhanced with an internally stored fixed program and serial instructions, which reduced the manual effort formerly required in programming.
ENIAC was the country’s primary computer for scientific problem-solving from 1949-52. As time went by, other computers that emulated ENIAC but that were able to operate at much lower costs began to appear. The ENIAC was finally decommissioned in October of 1955, but its legacy continues today.
Mary E. Shacklett
is President of Transworld Data, a marketing and technology practice specializing in marketing, public relations and product management for technology companies and organizations. Mary is listed in Who’s Who Worldwide and Who’s Who in the Computer Industry. She may be reached at (360) 956-9536 or TWD_Transworld@msn.com.