ENIAC, the first computer ever built

ENIAC, the first computer ever built

ENIAC (/ˈini.æk/ or /ˈɛni.æk/; Electronic Numerical Integrator And Computer)[1][2] was the first electronic general-purpose computer. It was Turing-complete, digital, and could solve "a large class of numerical problems" through reprogramming.[3][4]

Although ENIAC was designed and primarily used to calculate artillery firing tables for the United States Army's Ballistic Research Laboratory,[5][6] its first programs included a study of the feasibility of the thermonuclear weapon.[7]

ENIAC was formally dedicated at the University of Pennsylvania on February 15, 1946 and was heralded as a "Giant Brain" by the press.[8] It had a speed on the order of one thousand (103) times faster than that of electro-mechanicalmachines; this computational power, coupled with general-purpose programmability, excited scientists and industrialists alike. This combination of speed and programmability allowed for thousands more calculations for problems, as ENIAC calculated a trajectory that took a human 20 hours in 30 seconds (a 2400x increase in speed).