ENIAC

ENIAC was an early electronic, general-purpose digital computer completed in 1945. It used thousands of vacuum tubes and was programmed by configuring cables and switches.

Vacuum tube: An electronic component that controls electric current through a vacuum, used for amplification or switching. Vacuum tubes served as ENIAC’s high-speed electronic switches.
Ballistic Research Laboratory: A United States Army facility responsible for research and calculations related to artillery. The laboratory needed firing tables and sponsored ENIAC’s construction.
Kathleen Antonelli: An American mathematician who programmed ENIAC and helped prepare its first public demonstration. Antonelli was among the programmers who translated calculations into machine configurations.
Artillery firing table: A table of firing angles and settings used to aim artillery under specified conditions. Producing these tables was the Army’s original motivation for ENIAC.
EDVAC: An early electronic computer designed around the stored-program principle and a binary number system. Design discussions around ENIAC helped motivate the successor’s stored-program architecture.
Decimal computer: A computer that represents numbers using decimal digits rather than binary digits. ENIAC stored and calculated numbers in decimal form.
John Mauchly: An American physicist and computer pioneer who co-designed ENIAC with J. Presper Eckert. Mauchly proposed the electronic computing approach behind the project.
Jean Bartik: An American computer programmer who worked on ENIAC and later on early stored-program computers. Bartik helped program ENIAC and adapt it to new computational tasks.
Hydrogen bomb: A nuclear weapon that releases energy through fusion reactions initiated by a fission explosion. ENIAC was used for calculations related to the proposed hydrogen bomb.
UNIVAC I: The first commercially produced electronic computer in the United States, delivered in 1951. Eckert and Mauchly carried experience from ENIAC into this commercial computer.

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