ENIAC (pronounced /ˈɛni.æk/), short for Electronic Numerical Integrator And Computer, was the first general-purpose, electronic computer. It was a Turing-complete, digital computer capable of being reprogrammed to solve a full range of computing problems.
ENIAC was designed to calculate artillery firing tables for the United States Army's Ballistic Research Laboratory, but its first use was in calculations for the hydrogen bomb. When ENIAC was announced in 1946 it was heralded in the press as a "Giant Brain". It boasted speeds one thousand times faster than electro-mechanical machines, a leap in computing power that no single machine has since matched. This mathematical power, coupled with general-purpose programmability, excited scientists and industrialists. The inventors promoted the spread of these new ideas by teaching a series of lectures on computer architecture.
The ENIAC's design and construction was financed by the United States Army during World War II. The construction contract was signed on June 5, 1943, and work on the computer began in secret by the University of Pennsylvania's Moore School of Electrical Engineering starting the following month under the code name "Project PX". The completed machine was unveiled on February 14, 1946 at the University of Pennsylvania, having cost almost $500,000 (nearly $6 million in 2008, adjusted for inflation). It was formally accepted by the U.S. Army Ordnance Corps in July 1946. ENIAC was shut down on November 9, 1946 for a refurbishment and a memory upgrade, and was transferred to Aberdeen Proving Ground, Maryland in 1947. There, on July 29, 1947, it was turned on and was in continuous operation until 11:45 p.m. on October 2, 1955.
ENIAC was conceived and designed by John Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert of the University of Pennsylvania. The team of design engineers assisting the development included Robert F. Shaw (function tables), Chuan Chu (divider/square-rooter), Thomas Kite Sharpless (master programmer), Arthur Burks (multiplier), Harry Huskey (reader/printer), Jack Davis (accumulators) and Iredell Eachus Jr.
Description
The ENIAC was a modular computer, composed of individual panels to perform different functions. Twenty of these modules were accumulators, which could not only add and subtract but hold a ten-digit decimal number in memory. Numbers were passed between these units across a number of general-purpose buses, or trays, as they were called. In order to achieve its high speed, the panels had to send and receive numbers, compute, save the answer, and trigger the next operation—all without any moving parts. Key to its versatility was the ability to branch; it could trigger different operations that depended on the sign of a computed result.
Besides its speed, the most remarkable thing about ENIAC was its size and complexity. ENIAC contained 17,468 vacuum tubes, 7,200 crystal diodes, 1,500 relays, 70,000 resistors, 10,000 capacitors and around 5 million hand-soldered joints. It weighed more than 30 short tons (27 t), was roughly 8.5 by 3 by 80 feet (2.6 m × 0.9 m × 24 m), took up 680 square feet (63 m2), and consumed 150 kW of power. Input was possible from an IBM card reader, and an IBM card punch was used for output. These cards could be used to produce printed output offline using an IBM accounting machine, an example of which would be the IBM 405.
ENIAC used ten-position ring counters to store digits; each digit used 36 vacuum tubes, 10 of which were the dual triodes making up the flip-flops of the ring counter. Arithmetic was performed by "counting" pulses with the ring counters and generating carry pulses if the counter "wrapped around", the idea being to emulate in electronics the operation of the digit wheels of a mechanical adding machine. ENIAC had twenty ten-digit signed accumulators which used ten's complement representation and could perform 5,000 simple addition or subtraction operations between any of them and a source (e.g., another accumulator, or a constant transmitter) every second. It was possible to connect several accumulators to run simultaneously, so the peak speed of operation was potentially much higher due to parallel operation.
It was possible to wire the carry of one accumulator into another accumulator to perform double precision arithmetic, but the accumulator carry circuit timing prevented the wiring of three or more for higher precision. The ENIAC used four of the accumulators, controlled by a special Multiplier unit, to perform up to 385 multiplication operations per second. The ENIAC also used five of the accumulators, controlled by a special Divider/Square-Rooter unit, to perform up to forty division operations per second or three square root operations per second.
The other nine units in ENIAC were the Initiating Unit (which started and stopped the machine), the Cycling Unit (used for synchronizing the other units), the Master Programmer (which controlled "loop" sequencing), the Reader (which controlled an IBM punched card reader), the Printer (which controlled an IBM punched card punch), the Constant Transmitter, and three Function Tables.
Cpl. Herman Goldstine (foreground) sets the switches on one of the ENIAC's function tables at the Moore School of Electrical Engineering. (U.S. Army photo)
The references by Rojas and Hashagen (or Wilkes) give more details about the times for operations, which differ somewhat from those stated above. The basic machine cycle was 200 microseconds (20 cycles of the 100 kHz clock in the cycling unit), or 5,000 cycles per second for operations on the 10-digit numbers. In one of these cycles, ENIAC could write a number to a register, read a number from a register, or add/subtract two numbers. A multiplication of a 10-digit number by a d-digit number (for d up to 10) took d+4 cycles, so a 10- by 10-digit multiplication took 14 cycles, or 2800 microseconds—a rate of 357 per second. If one of the numbers had fewer than 10 digits, the operation was faster. Division and square roots took 13(d+1) cycles, where d is the number of digits in the result (quotient or square root). So a division or square root took up to 143 cycles, or 28,600 microseconds—a rate of 35 per second. (Wilkes 1956:20[9] states that a division with a 10 digit quotient required 6 milliseconds.) If the result had fewer than ten digits, it was obtained faster.
[edit]Reliability
ENIAC used common octal-base radio tubes of the day; the decimal accumulators were made of 6SN7 flip-flops, while 6L7s, 6SJ7s, 6SA7s and 6AC7s were used in logic functions. Numerous 6L6s and 6V6s served as line drivers to drive pulses through cables between rack assemblies.
Detail of the back of a section of ENIAC, showing vacuum tubes
Some electronics experts predicted that tube failures would occur so frequently that the machine would never be useful. This prediction turned out to be partially correct: several tubes burned out almost every day, leaving it nonfunctional about half the time. Special high-reliability tubes were not available until 1948. Most of these failures, however, occurred during the warm-up and cool-down periods, when the tube heaters and cathodes were under the most thermal stress. By the simple (but also expensive) expedient of never turning the machine off, the engineers reduced ENIAC's tube failures to the more acceptable rate of one tube every two days. According to a 1989 interview with Eckert the continuously failing tubes story was therefore mostly a myth: "We had a tube fail about every two days and we could locate the problem within 15 minutes."[10] In 1954, the longest continuous period of operation without a failure was 116 hours (close to five days).
[edit]Programming
Although the Ballistic Research Laboratory was the sponsor of ENIAC, one year into this three-year project John von Neumann, a mathematician working on the hydrogen bomb at Los Alamos, became aware of this computer. Los Alamos subsequently became so involved with ENIAC that the first test problem run was computations for the hydrogen bomb, not artillery tables. The input/output for this test was one million cards.
The ENIAC could be programmed to perform complex sequences of operations, which could include loops, branches, and subroutines. The task of taking a problem and mapping it onto the machine was complex, and usually took weeks. After the program was figured out on paper, the process of getting the program "into" the ENIAC by manipulating its switches and cables took additional days. This was followed by a period of verification and debugging, aided by the ability to "single step" the machine.
The six women who did most of the programming of ENIAC were inducted in 1997 into the Women in Technology International Hall of Fame. As they were called by each other in 1946, they were Kay McNulty, Betty Jennings, Betty Snyder, Marlyn Wescoff, Fran Bilas and Ruth Lichterman. Jennifer S. Light's essay, "When Computers Were Women" documents and describes the role of the women of ENIAC as well as outlines the historical omission or downplay of women's roles in computer science history.
ENIAC was a one-of-a-kind design and was never repeated. The freeze on design in 1943 meant that the computer design would lack some innovations that soon became well-developed, notably the inability to store a program. Eckert and Mauchly started work on a new design, to be later called the EDVAC, which would be both simpler and more powerful. In particular, in 1944 Eckert wrote his description of a memory unit (the mercury delay line) which would hold both the data and the program. John von Neumann, who was consulting for the Moore School on the EDVAC sat in on the Moore School meetings at which the stored program concept was elaborated, and wrote up an incomplete set of notes (First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC) intended to be used as an internal memorandum describing, elaborating, and couching in formal logical language the ideas developed in the meetings. Herman Goldstine distributed copies of the First Draft to a number of government and educational institutions, spurring widespread interest in the construction of a new generation of electronic computing machines, including EDSAC and SEAC.
A number of improvements were also made to ENIAC from 1948, including a primitive read-only stored programming mechanism using the Function Tables as program ROM, an idea included in the ENIAC patent and proposed independently by Dr. Richard Clippinger of the BRL. Clippinger consulted with von Neumann on what instruction set to implement. Clippinger had thought of a 3-address architecture while von Neumann proposed a 1-address architecture because it was simpler to implement. Three digits of one accumulator (6) were used as the program counter, another accumulator (15) was used as the main accumulator, a third accumulator (8) was used as the address pointer for reading data from the function tables, and most of the other accumulators (1–5, 7, 9–14, 17–19) were used for data memory. The programming of the stored program for ENIAC was done by Betty Jennings, Clippinger and Adele Goldstine. It was first demonstrated as a stored-program computer on September 16, 1948, running a program by Adele Goldstine for John von Neumann. This modification reduced the speed of ENIAC by a factor of six and eliminated the ability of parallel computation, but as it also reduced the reprogramming time to hours instead of days, it was considered well worth the loss of performance. Also analysis had shown that due to differences between the electronic speed of computation and the electromechanical speed of input/output, almost any real-world problem was completely I/O bound even without making use of the original machine's parallelism and most would still be I/O bound even after the speed reduction from this modification. Early in 1952, a high-speed shifter was added, which improved the speed for shifting by a factor of five. In July 1953, a 100-word expansion core memory was added to the system, using binary coded decimal, excess-3 number representation. To support this expansion memory, the ENIAC was equipped with a new Function Table selector, a memory address selector, pulse-shaping circuits, and three new orders were added to the programming mechanism.
Comparison with other early computers
Main article: History of computing hardware
Mechanical and electrical computing machines have been around since the 19th century, but the 1930s and 1940s are considered the beginning of the modern computer era.
The German Z3 (shown working in May 1941) was designed by Konrad Zuse. It was the first general-purpose digital computer, but it was electromechanical, rather than electronic, as it used relays for all functions. It computed logically using binary math. It was programmable by punched tape, but lacked the conditional branch. While not designed for Turing-completeness, it accidentally was, as it was found out in 1998 (but to exploit this Turing-completeness, complex, clever hacks were necessary). It was destroyed in a bombing on Berlin in December 1943.
The American Atanasoff–Berry Computer (ABC) (shown working in summer 1941) was the first electronic computing device. It implemented binary computation with vacuum tubes but was not general purpose, being limited to solving systems of linear equations. It also did not exploit electronic computing speeds, being limited by a rotating capacitor drum memory and an input-output system that was intended to write intermediate results to paper cards. It was manually controlled and was not programmable.
The British Colossus computers (used for cryptanalysis starting in 1943) were designed by Tommy Flowers. The Colossus computers (of which ten were built) were digital, all-electronic, and could be reprogrammed by rewiring, but they were dedicated to code breaking and not general purpose.
Howard Aiken's 1944 Harvard Mark I was programmed by punched tape and used relays. It performed general math functions, but lacked any branching.
The ENIAC was, like the Z3 and Mark I, able to run an arbitrary sequence of mathematical operations, but did not read them from a tape. Like the Colossus, the operations happened at electronic speed. The ENIAC combined full, Turing complete programmability with electronic speed.
Defining characteristics of some early digital computers of the 1940s (In the history of computing hardware)
Name First operational Numeral system Computing mechanism Programming Turing complete
Zuse Z3 (Germany) May 1941 Binary floating point Electro-mechanical Program-controlled by punched film stock (but no conditional branch) Yes (1998)
Atanasoff–Berry Computer (US) 1942 Binary Electronic Not programmable—single purpose No
Colossus Mark 1 (UK) February 1944 Binary Electronic Program-controlled by patch cables and switches No
Harvard Mark I – IBM ASCC (US) May 1944 Decimal Electro-mechanical Program-controlled by 24-channel punched paper tape (but no conditional branch) No
Colossus Mark 2 (UK) June 1944 Binary Electronic Program-controlled by patch cables and switches No
Zuse Z4 (Germany) March 1945 Binary floating point Electro-mechanical Program-controlled by punched film stock Yes
ENIAC (US) July 1946 Decimal Electronic Program-controlled by patch cables and switches Yes
Manchester Small-Scale Experimental Machine (Baby) (UK) June 1948 Binary Electronic Stored-program in Williams cathode ray tube memory Yes
Modified ENIAC (US) September 1948 Decimal Electronic Program-controlled by patch cables and switches plus a primitive read-only stored programming mechanism using the Function Tables as program ROM Yes
EDSAC (UK) May 1949 Binary Electronic Stored-program in mercury delay line memory Yes
Manchester Mark 1 (UK) October 1949 Binary Electronic Stored-program in Williams cathode ray tube memory and magnetic drum memory Yes
CSIRAC (Australia) November 1949 Binary Electronic Stored-program in mercury delay line memory Yes
The ABC, ENIAC and Colossus all used thermionic valves (vacuum tubes). ENIAC's registers performed decimal arithmetic, rather than binary arithmetic like the Z3 or the Atanasoff-Berry Computer.
Until 1948, ENIAC required rewiring to reprogram, like the Colossus. The idea of the stored-program computer with combined memory for program and data was conceived during the development of the ENIAC, but it was not implemented at that time because World War II priorities required the machine to be completed quickly, and it was realized that 20 storage locations for memory and programs would be much too small.
Public knowledge
The Z3 and Colossus were developed independently of each other and independently from the ABC and the ENIAC during World War II. The Z3 was destroyed by Allied bombing of Berlin in 1943. The Colossus machines were part of the UK's war effort, and were destroyed in 1945 to maintain secrecy. Their existence only became generally known in the 1970s, though knowledge of their capabilities remained among their UK staff and invited Americans. The ABC was dismantled by Iowa State University, after John Atanasoff was called to Washington, D.C. to do physics research for the U.S. Navy. ENIAC, by contrast, was put through its paces for the press in 1946, "and captured the world's imagination". Older histories of computing may therefore not be comprehensive in their coverage and analysis of this period.
Patent
Honeywell v. Sperry Rand
For a variety of reasons (including Mauchly's June 1941 examination of the Atanasoff–Berry Computer, prototyped in 1939 by John Atanasoff and Clifford Berry), US patent 3,120,606 for the ENIAC, granted in 1964, was voided by the 1973 decision of the landmark federal court case Honeywell v. Sperry Rand, putting the invention of the electronic digital computer in the public domain and providing legal recognition to Atanasoff as the inventor of the first electronic digital computer.
Parts on display
Four ENIAC panels and one of its three function tables, on display at the School of Engineering and Applied Science at the University of Pennsylvania
The School of Engineering and Applied Science at the University of Pennsylvania has four of the original forty panels and one of the three function tables of the ENIAC. The Smithsonian has five panels in the National Museum of American History in Washington D.C. The Science Museum in London has a receiver unit on display. The Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California has a single panel on display. The University of Michigan in Ann Arbor has four panels, salvaged by Arthur Burks. The U.S. Army Ordnance Museum at Aberdeen Proving Ground, Maryland, where ENIAC was used, has one of the function tables. There is also a panel on display at Perot Systems in Plano, Texas.
As of 1997, a square chip of silicon measuring 0.25 inches (8 mm) on a side holds the same capacity as the ENIAC, which occupied a large room.
(source:wikipedia)
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