World’s first electronic computer born at University of Pennsylvania
By Christie Ileto
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PHILADELPHIA (WPVI) — It’s a piece of Philadelphia history that powered the future. The world’s first electronic computer was born at the University of Pennsylvania.
It was a room-sized machine built for war that eventually launched the modern digital age that we know now.
It was called the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer, aka ENIAC.
“It was created just right across the hall 80 years ago, in 1946,” said Paul Shaffer, a historian for ENIAC.
Inside the Moore School of Electrical Engineering at the University of Pennsylvania sits 1/10th of what was once a room-sized computer.
At its 1946 unveiling, ENIAC was made up of 40 nine-foot-high cabinets containing 18,000 vacuum tubes, 10,000 capacitors, and 6,000 switches.
“(It’s) not like standard computers today that take instructions out of stored memory and execute them one at a time. This, instead, was programmed by patching wires together,” said Shaffer. “Before then, we do calculations. They used gears and levers; computing was so slow back in those days.”
Shaffer says it was unlike any other computing device of its time.
It was developed during World War II to address the military’s need for quick and accurate computations.
It’s the brainchild of Professor John Mauchly and graduate student John Eckert Jr., along with six female mathematicians.
“Another problem that they were working on was the trajectory of artillery shells. Not too short, because that’s where the good guys are. You don’t want that. Let’s make sure it goes over the good guys and lands on the bad guys. So it’s very important. They had guns that they could not put out into the war because they lacked the firing table. How to calculate one entry in the firing table took about 12 hours on a calculator,” said Shaffer.
Their vision to bring more firepower to U.S. troops flipped the switch on the digital age.
“Ultimately, at the end of the day, it really was a model of how to do computing general purpose computing,” said Dr. Vijay Kumar, the dean of engineering.
Computing and computers have evolved into much more powerful, smaller PCs, laptops, tablets, smartphones, and smartwatches.
The prototype for this ingenuity began right here in University City.
“The University of Pennsylvania is very proud to have started all this,” said Shaffer. “We’d like to think that this was the machine that started the information age, and that it all started right here in Philadelphia, right here in this building at 33rd and Walnut.”
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