What was eniac original speed

The idea of huge computing machines was in the air at that time. In late , Harvard professor Howard Aiken was building the Mark 1, a giant calculator.

At Bletchley Park in England, cryptographers would oversee the construction of a special-purpose code-breaking machine called Colossus. Atanasoff, who had plans to build his own huge calculating machine but never completed the task.

What distinguished Eniac from the others was that a working machine performing thousands of calculations a second could be easily reprogrammed for different tasks. It was a breathtaking enterprise. Weighing in at 30 tons, the U-shaped construct filled a 1,square-foot room.

Its 40 cabinets, each of them nine feet high, were packed with 18, vacuum tubes, 10, capacitors, 6, switches and 1, relays. Looking at the consoles, observers could see a tangle of patch cords that reminded them of a telephone exchange. But by the time Eniac was completed, the war was over. The machine did not boot up until November , when neon lights attached to accumulators lit up a basement room at the Moore School.

Their proposal was entitled Report on an Electronic Difference Analyzer. By calling their proposed device an electronic difference analyzer Eckert and Mauchly tried to make the distinction between the electromechanical analog differential analyzer that the United States Army was using and the new electronic digital machine that would be developed. The proposal was submitted to army ordnance in May. When the first contracts were signed between the U.

Mauchly, along with Eckert, was put in charge of engineering and testing. The actual contract between the Moore School and the army did not go into effect until July 1. With eighteen thousand vacuum tubes and weighing thirty tons, the ENIAC was about one thousand times faster than the Harvard Mark I , and 10, times the speed of a human computer doing a calculation. Programming the ENIAC was accomplished by time-consuming plugging of patch cords from buses to panels for each individual problem.

It could only do one kind of program at a time, and to change the program meant completely rewiring it. Sometimes it could take a team of scientists two days to reprogram the machine. ENIAC filled an entire room. With its bank of blinking lights and 6, manual switches, it looked like something we'd associate with a s science fiction movie.

Probably because it's what spawned those movies anyway.