During World War II, the U.S. military asked Dr. Mochili of the University of Pennsylvania and his student eckert to design an "electronic" computer-ENIAC (Electronic Digital Integrator and Calculator), which used vacuum tubes instead of relays to calculate the trajectory of shells.
This machine uses 18800 vacuum tube, which is 50 feet long and 30 feet wide. It covers an area of 1500 square feet and weighs 30 tons (about one and a half classrooms, six elephants). Its calculation speed is very fast, and it can engage in 5000 addition operations per second. It has been running for nine years. Eating electricity is fierce. It is said that every time ENIAC is turned on, the lights in the west side of Philadelphia will be eclipsed.
In addition, the loss rate of vacuum tubes is quite high, and a vacuum tube may be burned out almost every 15 minutes. It takes the operator more than 15 minutes to find out the broken pipe, which is extremely inconvenient to use. Someone once joked: "As long as that machine can run continuously for five days without burning vacuum tubes, congratulations to the inventor." .
It has been more than 50 years since the first computer was born. During this period, computers developed at an alarming rate. First, transistors replaced electron tubes, and then, with the development of microelectronics technology, the components on computer processors and memories became smaller and smaller, and the computing speed and storage capacity of computers increased rapidly.
19941In February 1994, Intel Corporation of the United States announced that it had successfully developed the fastest supercomputer in the world, which can perform 328 billion addition operations per second (66 million times that of the first electronic computer). If people are allowed to complete the calculation in one second, it takes one person to calculate around the clock for more than 10 thousand years.
Compared with today's computers, "Eniac" at that time was not as good as some advanced pocket calculators, but its birth opened a brand-new information age for mankind and brought about great changes in human society.
1996 February 14, on the 50th anniversary of the advent of every electronic computer in the world, US Vice President Al Gore started this computer again to commemorate the arrival of the information age.
(People's Network Information)