eniac in full Electronic Numerical Integrator andComputer, the first programmable general-purpose electronic digital computer, built during World War II by the United States. In the United States, government funding during the war went to a project led by John Mauchly, J. Presper Eckert, Jr., and their colleagues at the Moore School of Electrical Engineering at the University of Pennsylvania; their objective was an all-electronic computer. Under contract to the army and under the direction of Herman Goldstine, work began in early 1943 on ENIAC. The next year, mathematician John von Neumann—already on full-time leave from the Institute for Advanced Studies (IAS), in Princeton, N.J., for various government research projects (including the Manhattan Project)—began frequent consultations with the group.[עריכת קוד מקור | עריכה]
ENIAC was something less than the dream of a universal computer. Designed for the specific purpose of computing values for artillery range tables, it lacked some features that would have made it a more generally useful machine. It used plugboards for communicating instructions to the machine; this had the advantage that, once the instructions were thus “programmed,” the machine ran at electronic speed. Instructions read from a card reader or other slow mechanical device would not have been able to keep up with the all-electronic ENIAC. The disadvantage was that it took days to rewire the machine for each new problem. This was such a liability that only with some generosity could it be called programmable.[עריכת קוד מקור | עריכה]
