Part of ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator And Computer), considered for decades the first electronic computer, has been put on public display at the Fort Sill Field Artillery Museum in Oklahoma, in the USA, after a restoration. The project began during World War II to solve computational ballistic problems related to the launch of artillery shells but was activated only in 1946.
When the secret surrounding the British Colossus computer was raised, the history of computer science was partially rewritten. However, ENIAC was designed as a general purpose computer, meaning as a computer which could be programmed to solve different kinds of problems. In fact, despite being born as a military project it was also used for civilian purposes such as the classification of census data and scientific applications such as weather forecasting by John von Neumann.
It was the early history of computers and ENIAC, with its 18,000 vacuum tubes, its 30 tons of weight and the about 167 square meters (1,800 square feet) of surface area occupied, wasn’t exactly a laptop. In 1955 it was considered obsolete by the US Army and part of it was sent to the Smithsonian Institution Museum to be exposed. Another part of it ended up in Fort Still to be forgotten for a long time, lost in old warehouses and in the bureaucracy.
In 2006, billionaire Ross Perot bought a part of ENIAC and obtained Fort Still’s panels in exchange for a promise to restore them. In 2007, a part of ENIAC was put on display in the Perot’s building office but few people could see it. Perot’s company was bought by Dell in 2009 and an agreement was reached to return the ENIAC’s parts to Fort Still.
The restoration was complex and hasn’t yet been completed. The computer remains incomplete although some new vacuum tubes are expected to be added. It can no longer work but will give the chance to see what a computer of the ’40s was like. The huge difference compared to current computers clearly shows the incredible progress made throughout the decades.
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