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"A new mathematical robot" |
This issue of the radio hobbyist magazine
"Radio News" appeared in April 1946.The cover features an impressive
ham radio station... but inside, on page 22, is buried a short
article that didn't
even make it to the cover. The modest half-page item reports a "New mathematical robot" recently announced by the War Dept. This device, containing nearly 18,000 tubes, is a "digital" or "discrete variable" computing machine, as opposed to the "continuous variable" type. The "basic arithmetical rate of the machine" is 5kHz (in today's terminology: the CPU runs at a clock frequency of 0.000005 GHz). This "robot" was none other than the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer (ENIAC for short), known (not without some controversy) as the first general-purpose electronic computer... |
Click photo to enlarge |
The photo at
right, in the same issue, shows Dr. J.W. Mauchly, one of the ENIAC's inventors,
setting the machine up for a computing task - programming it, in
fact.
Click here to read the entire article! Exhibit provenance: More info: http://www.library.upenn.edu/special/gallery/mauchly/jwmintro.html |
Click photo to enlarge |
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