ENIAC

There are slides devoted to this topic: Lecture 0, pp. 27-34, Lecture 7c.

Websites

Introduce yourself to the ENIAC by checking out the Computer History Museum’s page on the ENIAC, which includes broad historical information and lots of pictures.

Read “The ENIAC of John Mauchly and John Eckert” at History of Computers to learn more about the process behind creating the ENIAC.

Check out the University of Pennsylvania’s online exhibit on “John W. Mauchly and the Development of the ENIAC Computer.” The exhibit traces Mauchly’s life and his involvement with the ENIAC through documents and pictures preserved by UPenn’s Department of Special Collections.

Read about what a researcher at Aberdeen Proving Ground had to say about “The ENIAC Story.” Written in 1961 and originally published in ORDNANCE magazine, this article covers the need for and the development and design of the ENIAC.

The Smithsonian offers an overview of the ENIAC adapted from an book on Landmarks in Digital Computing.  Venture deeper into the Smithsonian’s vaults to read several different press releases written for the ENIAC and released in 1945.

UPenn – the birthplace of the ENIAC – recently returned to its computing roots by creating ENIAC-on-a-chip, an educational tool that both simulates the ENIAC on a modern computer and illustrates the advances made in computing technology. Read a description of the “ENIAC-on-a-chip” project written by a professor on staff.

If you’re feeling adventurous, you might want to read the article “How the ENIAC Took a Square Root,” written by computer scientist and professor Brian Shelburne.  This article contains a fair amount of advanced mathematics.

Want to know more about the ENIAC? Check out the links on the “The History of Computer Information” page, assembled by late computer scientist Mike Muuss.

Other Media

Check out this online collection of ENIAC photographs from Lexikon’s History of Computing.

Or try your hand at programming ENIAC using the ENIAC simulation, developed by the Computer Science Institute of the Free University in Berlin.

Journal Articles

IEEE: “ENIAC- A Problem Solver,” W. Barkley Fitz: This article focuses on the 10 years that ENIAC was in service, covering the people who operated it, the problems it solved and how it did so, issues encountered during its operation, and its place in history. There is also an appendix listing the problems solved by ENIAC.

Books

The History of Computers: a family album of computer genealogy, Less Freed, 41-44, 48-49