8. who invented the eniac computer

Franklin Institute. In June J. With the goal of speeding up the calculation of artillery firing tables, on April 8, Eckert and Mauchly submitted a proposal to the Ballistic Research Laboratory at Aberdeen Proving Ground , near Aberdeen, Maryland. Their proposal was entitled Report on an Electronic Difference Analyzer. By calling their proposed device an electronic difference analyzer Eckert and Mauchly tried to make the distinction between the electromechanical analog differential analyzer that the United States Army was using and the new electronic digital machine that would be developed.

The proposal was submitted to army ordnance in May. When the first contracts were signed between the U. Mauchly, along with Eckert, was put in charge of engineering and testing. In late , Harvard professor Howard Aiken was building the Mark 1, a giant calculator. At Bletchley Park in England, cryptographers would oversee the construction of a special-purpose code-breaking machine called Colossus.

Atanasoff, who had plans to build his own huge calculating machine but never completed the task. What distinguished Eniac from the others was that a working machine performing thousands of calculations a second could be easily reprogrammed for different tasks. It was a breathtaking enterprise. Weighing in at 30 tons, the U-shaped construct filled a 1,square-foot room. Its 40 cabinets, each of them nine feet high, were packed with 18, vacuum tubes, 10, capacitors, 6, switches and 1, relays.

Looking at the consoles, observers could see a tangle of patch cords that reminded them of a telephone exchange. But by the time Eniac was completed, the war was over. The machine did not boot up until November , when neon lights attached to accumulators lit up a basement room at the Moore School. On February 14, , the government released Eniac from its shroud of secrecy. John Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert built the machine at the University of Pennsylvania at the behest of the U.

Mauchly had attracted the army's attention when he announced in that he thought vacuum tubes could be used to speed up the mechanical calculators being used at the time. Speedy calculations was just what the military needed during World War II as they pounded out tables for their weapons arsenal -- tables that could tell a soldier just which settings a particular piece of artillery needed under a particular set of conditions. The calculations involved could take a human days to complete.