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ENIAC 80th Anniversary (2026)

Dedicated February 15, 1946, the Electronic Numerical Integrator And Computer was the first programmable, general-purpose, electronic digital computer.

Conceived of near the end of WWII, ENIAC was designed for the U.S. Army to calculate artillery tables, a process that entailed slow, painstaking calculation by human computers. It was built at the University of Pennsylvania by a team led by John Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert, and primarily programmed by a group of six women mathematicians, themselves former computers: Betty Holberton, Kay McNulty, Marlyn Wescoff, Ruth Lichterman, Betty Jean Jennings, and Fran Bilas.

ENIAC was accepted by the Ordnance Corps in 1946, moving to the Ballistics Research Laboratory at Aberdeen Proving Grounds, Maryland the next year. At the BRL, it was maintained for the rest of its lifespan, being modified to allow for stored programming in 1948, and upgraded to use core memory in 1953. It operated until its destruction by lightning strike in 1955.

While ENIAC was a one-of-a-kind computer with little architectural influence on subsequent machines, members of its development team designed the EDVAC, which in turn influenced most contemporary computers via the First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC, written by John von Neumann and widely distributed before completion by Herman Goldstein. In this sense, it is responsible for the modern computer age.

First image: ENIAC at the Moore School of Engineering, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA.
Second image: ENIAC at the BRL, Aberdeen, MD.
Last three images: Close ups of ENIAC parts in the collection of the Computer History Museum, Mountain View, CA.

Image sources:
CHM, via Wayback Machine (1, 3)
U.S. Army photo, via Wikimedia Commons (2)
Core Memory: A Visual Survey of Vintage Computers, Mark Richards, 2007 (4, 5)