The First Electronic Computers (1940s)

ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator and Calculator), built by J. Presper Eckert and John Mauchly at the University of Pennsylvania, was the world’s first general-purpose electronic computer. It included the following features:

  • It was 80 feet long by 8.5 feet high and several feet wide.

  • It used 18,000 vacuum tubes.

  • It was two orders of magnitude (102) bigger than today’s machines.

  • It was more than eight orders of magnitude (108) slower than today’s machines.

Recently, there has been some controversy about the work of John Atanasoff, who built a small-scale electronic computer in the early 1940s. His machine, designed at Iowa State University, was a special-purpose computer that was never completely operational. Mauchly briefly visited Atanasoff before he built ENIAC.


Review: Computer History
    Which is the first general-purpose electronic computer?

      Cray-1
      ENIAC
      IBM System/360
      UNIVAC I
Result:        




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