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How the World's First Computer Was Rescued From the Scrap Heap

Posted by Soulskill on from the one-man's-trash dept.

anavictoriasaavedra sends this quote from Wired: "Eccentric billionaires are tough to impress, so their minions must always think big when handed vague assignments. Ross Perot's staffers did just that in 2006, when their boss declared that he wanted to decorate his Plano, Texas, headquarters with relics from computing history. Aware that a few measly Apple I's and Altair 880's wouldn't be enough to satisfy a former presidential candidate, Perot's people decided to acquire a more singular prize: a big chunk of ENIAC, the "Electronic Numerical Integrator And Computer." The ENIAC was a 27-ton, 1,800-square-foot bundle of vacuum tubes and diodes that was arguably the world's first true computer. The hardware that Perot's team diligently unearthed and lovingly refurbished is now accessible to the general public for the first time, back at the same Army base where it almost rotted into oblivion.

5 of 126 comments (clear)

  1. Except... by SkunkPussy · · Score: 4, Insightful

    ...it wasn't the first computer.

    --
    SURELY NOT!!!!!
    1. Re:Except... by arth1 · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Several years later than this one:
      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z...

      The Z3 was the first electromechanical gp computer
      The ABC was the first electronic non-gp computer
      The Colossus was the first electronic gp computer
      The ENIAC was the first American gp computer.

    2. Re:Except... by Baloroth · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Colossus absolutely was general purpose - it just wasn't stored program. You had to set it up fresh for each program.

      No, it wasn't general purpose. It was designed from the ground up to solve a very specific class of problems. It would have been possible (as the linked article states) to put a bunch of them together to form a Universal Turing computer, but it itself was not general purpose nor Turing complete.

      --
      "None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license." --John Milton
  2. ENIAC wasn't the first by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Informative

    ENIAC wasn't the first electronic programmable computer. Colossus was. It was used for code breaking in WW2. Colossus Mark 1 was up and running by December 1943, and Mark 2 (using shift registers to increase speed) was up and running by June 1944. The only reason people think of ENIAC instead of Colossus, was that Colossus's existence was kept secret up until the 1970s. By that time ENIAC got all the publicity.

  3. Re:the first built in the US by Waffle+Iron · · Score: 5, Insightful

    No, Colossus was General Purpose

    True, but only as long as all your purposes are restricted to cracking the codes from a particular model of Nazi mechanical encryption device.