B2. ENIAC

Year: 1945
Zone: Hardware & Architecture
Band: inner
Tier: Built

The first general-purpose electronic digital computer, completed in 1945 and unveiled in February 1946. Every glowing dot in this portal stands for 50 of its vacuum tubes. Some just burned out: find them and swap them.

Vacuum tubes~17,500
Mass~27 t
Speed5,000 adds/s

Portal

Tube wall · 350 dots × 50 tubes

347 / 350 OK

Click the dark, flickering tubes to replace them.

How big? Lengths, to scale

ENIAC's panels, end to end · ~24 m

A person · 1.7 m

A smartphone · 0.15 m

The phone does billions of operations a second on a few watts. ENIAC did 5,000 additions a second on about 150 kW.

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Sources

[TBD: source] ([TBD: source])

Caveat

The label 'first' applies to general-purpose electronic digital computers, not to computing machines as a whole.

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Sources

Caveat

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