The largest computer in the world, so which one is it? Let me introduce it to you below.
The world’s largest computer
ENIAC, the full name is Electronic Numerical Integrator And Computer, that is, Electronic Numerical Integral Computer. ENIAC is the world's first general-purpose computer and the second electronic computer after ABC (Atanasoff-Berry Computer).
It is a Turing-complete electronic computer that can be reprogrammed to solve various computing problems. It was announced in the United States on February 14, 1946. The "Moore Group" responsible for the development task consisted of four scientists and engineers: Eckert, Moakley, Goldstein, and Box.
Chief Engineer Eckert was only 25 years old at the time.
Basic overview
The world’s second modern electronic computer, ENIAC, was born at the University of Pennsylvania on February 14, 1946, and was officially launched the next day. Announced to the public.
ENIAC is 30.48 meters long, 6 meters wide and 2.4 meters high. It covers an area of ??about 170 square meters, has 30 operating stations, weighs 30 tons, consumes 150 kilowatts of electricity, and costs US$480,000. It contains 17,468 vacuum tubes (electron tubes), 7,200 crystal diodes, 1,500 relays, 70,000 resistors, 10,000 capacitors, 1,500 relays, and more than 6,000 switches. The calculation speed is per 5,000 additions or 400 multiplications per second, which is 1,000 times that of an electromechanical computer that uses relays and 200,000 times that of manual calculation. [1]
Media misinformation
Some media once misrepresented that ENIAC was the first computer. In fact, the real first computer was Atanasoff-Berry. Computer (Atanasoff? Berry Computer, referred to as ABC computer). ENIAC was the second computer and the first general-purpose computer.
R&D process
Reasons for R&D
The idea of ??developing an electronic computer came about during the Second World War. At that time, fierce fighting was going on, and the weapons and equipment of various countries were still very poor. The main strategic weapons were aircraft and cannons. Therefore, it was very necessary and urgent to develop new cannons and missiles. To this end, the U.S. Army Ordnance Department established the "Ballistic Research Laboratory" in Aberdeen, Maryland. [2]
The U.S. military requires the laboratory to provide the Army Artillery Force with 6 launch tables every day for technical evaluation of missile development. In fact, hundreds of ballistics need to be calculated for each shot table, and the mathematical model of each ballistic is a very complex set of nonlinear equations. There is no way to find exact solutions to these equations, so numerical methods can only be used to calculate them approximately.
Time is victory
However, even using numerical methods to approximate the solution is not an easy task! According to the calculation tools at the time, the laboratory would have hired more than 200 calculators to work overtime. It also takes more than two months to complete a shooting table. In the war era where "time is victory", how can such a slow speed be achieved? I'm afraid the defeat has been decided before advanced weapons are developed.
In order to change this unfavorable situation, John Mauchly, who was then working at the Mauch School of Electrical Engineering at the University of Pennsylvania, proposed the initial idea of ??trial-producing the first electronic computer in 1942: a high-speed tube computing device. The use of?, it is expected to use electronic tubes instead of relays to increase the calculation speed of the machine.
When the U.S. military learned of this idea, it immediately allocated funds to support it and established a development team headed by Moshili and John Eckert to start the development work with a budget of US$150,000. , which was a huge sum of money at the time. If it weren't for the war, who would be willing to spend such a large sum of money! Although war is evil, it has occasionally promoted the development of science and technology.
Von Neumann
What made the development work very lucky was that the mathematician von Neumann, who was a consultant to the Institute of Ballistics at the time and was participating in the development of the first atomic bomb in the United States, Mann (v?n Weumann, 1903-1957, Hungarian-American) joined the development team in the middle of the development process with a large number of calculation problems encountered during the development of the atomic bomb (1944). The original ENIAC had two problems. It had no memory and it was controlled using a wiring board. It even took several days to connect, and the computing speed was offset by this work. In 1945, von Neumann and his development team published a new stored-program general-purpose electronic computer solution EDVAC (Electronic Discrete Variable Automatic Computer) based on joint discussions. In the process, he made great contributions to computers. He made important contributions to the solution of many key problems, thus ensuring the smooth advent of the computer.
Although ENIAC is huge in size and consumes an astonishing amount of power, its computing speed is only a few thousand operations (the fastest supercomputer in the world now is the Tianhe-2 funded by China, which operates at a speed of 549 petaflops per second). Point calculation!), but it was 1,000 times faster than the existing computing devices at the time, and it also had the function of automatically performing arithmetic operations, logical operations and storing data according to pre-programmed programs. ENIAC announced the beginning of a new era. Since then, the door to scientific computing has been opened.
The role of war
But why did the world’s first electronic computer have to wait until the mid-1940s to come out? The main reasons here are whether the actual needs are urgent and whether the funds are in place. question. There is always a practical need, of course, and who wouldn't want to own a state-of-the-art computing tool? But need alone doesn't determine everything. The development of a new tool always requires a large upfront investment (when developing ENIAC, the initial investment was US$150,000, but the final total investment was as high as US$480,000, which was a huge sum of money in the 1940s!). There are always a few people who are brave enough to spend money on a tool that has not yet been invented.
In the end, it was the war that made the birth of the computer a reality. In fact, among various social needs, the needs during war are always the most urgent, because they are a matter of life and death. The government and military are always generous and apply the latest scientific and technological achievements to the development of strategic and conventional weapons to ensure that their own military is in a leading position.
The development of electronic computers began in the smoke of World War II. As mentioned earlier, in order to provide accurate and timely ballistic firepower tables for U.S. ordnance tests, a high-speed calculation tool was urgently needed. Therefore, with the strong support of the US military, the world's first electronic computer ENIAC began to be developed in 1942. Participating in the development work is a development team headed by Mosely and Eckert of the Moore School of Electrical Engineering at the University of Pennsylvania.
Development
Actual development
What can this behemoth ENIAC do? It can perform 5,000 addition operations per second (according to calculations, it is the fastest human calculation The speed is only 5 addition operations per second) and 400 multiplication operations per second. It can also perform square and cubic operations, calculate the values ??of trigonometric functions such as sine and cosine, and other more complex operations.
From our perspective, this is of course trivial.
But this was a great achievement at the time! A ballistic trajectory that originally took more than 20 minutes to calculate now only takes 30 seconds! This suddenly alleviated the extremely serious problem at that time that the calculation speed lagged far behind the actual requirements. .
Since von Neumann was participating in the development of the atomic bomb at that time, he joined the development of computers with a large number of computing problems encountered during the development of the atomic bomb. Therefore, it can be said that ENIAC also contributed a lot to the birth of the world's first atomic bomb.
But even at the time, ENIAC had many shortcomings: in addition to being large in size and consuming a lot of power, the tubes were easily damaged due to the high heat generated by the machine's operation. As long as one electron tube is damaged, the entire machine will not be able to operate normally, so it is very troublesome to find the damaged one among the more than 18,000 electron tubes and then replace it with a new one.
Update and development
Of course people will not be satisfied with this. So since the advent of the first computer, more and more high-performance computers have been developed. Computers have developed from the first generation to the fourth generation, and are currently developing towards the fifth and sixth generation smart computers. Like the original ENIAC, many high-performance computers are always serving the development of sophisticated and conventional weapons, especially nuclear weapons.
Like all tools invented by mankind, computers were created due to practical needs. Since the 18th century, the level of science and technology has made great progress. The knowledge of logic circuits and electron tube technology necessary to build electronic computers had emerged and been perfected in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Therefore, it can be said that the basic scientific knowledge for building computers is complete.
Historical clarification
In most domestic media, it will appear that the world’s first electronic computer was the ENIAC invented by American John Mauchly in 1946. Written records, but another theory is: the world's first electronic computer was developed by Professor John Vincent Atanasoff of Iowa State University in the United States and his graduate student Clifford The Atanasoff-Berry Computer (ABC) developed by Mr. Clifford Berry from 1937 to 1941.
However, very few friends in China know the truth of this matter. Many domestic authors still promote ENIAC as the world’s first computer in their monographs, textbooks, and even science popularization activities. . Therefore, as an IT worker, it is necessary to clarify the facts for predecessors in a scientific spirit. I hope that this article will help correct this major academic misunderstanding that has long existed in the domestic intellectual community and set the record straight.
It has been confirmed that the world's first computer should be "ABC". In 1941, Mokoli, one of the inventors of ?ENIAC?, stayed at Atanasov's house for 5 days and took the opportunity to steal research results and ideas. Later, he and Eckert created ?ENIAC? and applied for it. He received a patent and was called the "Father of Modern Computers" by the world. However, Atanasov did not pay attention to his major invention "ABC", and the school did not pay attention to this invention and demolished "ABC". Later, after a U.S. court ruling overturned and revoked Mokoli's patent, the basic idea of ??modern computers came from John Vincent Atanasoff.
Exhibition section
Panels and other components of ENIAC were exhibited at the following locations after decommissioning:
School of Engineering and Applied Science at the University of Pennsylvania, where ENIAC was invented Has 40 panels.
The Smithsonian Institution owns five panels and is on display at the Museum of American History in Washington, DC.
The Science Museum in London, England, has a receiving device.
The Computer Museum in Mountain View, California (where Google is headquartered) has three panels.
The U.S. Army Ordnance Museum in Maryland has a component, and next to it is the Aberdeen base where ENIAC served.
The University of Michigan, which participated in the ENIAC study, has four panels in its College of Engineering.
West Point has data entry equipment.