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Computer History page 3 The second world war brought new challenges to the computer industry. Most of the computing machines manufactured by IBM and other companies were electromechanical devices--machines powered by electricity, but filled with many moving parts. As the war progressed, the military found itself more and more reliant on these electromechanical calculating machines. The defense department's Ballistics Research Laboratory (BRL) used equipment from IBM and other suppliers to create artillary tables. U.S. troops in the field would refer to these tables in order to determine the potential trajectory for shells fired under a variety of soil, weather, and altitude conditions.
Like the analytical engine and the Hollerith tabulating machine, ENIAC was designed to accept and store input, process the input, and output a solution. However, ENIAC had one major advantage over its electromechanical predecessors. Because it was entirely electronic, ENIAC had almost no moving parts. Instead of relying on levers and gears and springs and other slow-moving mechanical devices, ENIAC used pulses of electricity to represent data.
ENIAC was able to propel data down its wires at an unimaginably high rate of speed. The computer could count to 5000 in a fraction of a second, and powered its way through more complicated mathematical operations at a breakneck pace. Tedious calculations that frustrated BRL mathemeticians for days were solved by ENIAC in mere minutes. Although ENIAC represented a major step forward in computing power, it was notoriously difficult to use. Reprogramming the machine to solve a new problem usually required the redirection of thousands of feet of electrical cable. A team of electrical engineers trying to teach ENIAC a new problem-solving skill could easily spend two or more full days rerouting the wires used by ENIAC to process input.
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Unfortunately, the mathematics behind these tables were exceedingly complex. Even with the finest mechanical calculators available, it could take a skilled BRL mathematician up to 40 hours just to calculate a single trajectory. As the war escalated, changing weather and soil conditions created a demand for artillery tables that the BRL simply could not meet. It became apparent that the slow and cumbersome electromechanical computers of the time simply were not up to the task.
The call went out for something faster, and researchers at America's major universities heeded the cry. In 1945, John Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert, scientists at the University of Pennsylvania, powered on ENIAC--the world's first fully electronic computer. ENIAC, a fifty-ton tangle of wires, switches, resistors, and vacuum tubes, was immense. It occupied almost one entire floor of an engineering building, and required so much electricity that lights dimmed all across Philadelphia the first time ENIAC was fired up.
ENIAC derived its storage and processing power primarily from an intricate network of over 17,000 vacuum tubes. A vacuum tube consists of a thin wire, called a filament, enclosed in a palm-sized glass tube. Large amounts of electricity are used to heat the filament until it glows. The heated filament then releases a stream of electrons into the tube. The flowing electrons create pulses of electrical current that can be routed down wires, allowing for the movement of data.