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US Army photo of ENIAC

1943- The building of the Electronic Numerical Integrator And Computer (ENIAC) begins at the University of Pennsylvania’s Moore School of Electrical Engineering. The Army financed the project during World War II, which cost almost $500,000. John Mauchly was the chief consultant and John Presper Eckert was the chief engineer.

ENIAC was code named “Project PX“. The consent to build was signed on June 5. ENIAC was completed on February 14, 1946. This was a modular computer, designed in “panels”. You could build to suit. Of course, this machine was so big, it took up whole rooms. It ran hot, too – using Octal based radio tubes. ENIAC could be programmed to perform complex sequences of operations, including loops, branches, and subroutines.

Full Day in Tech History podcast show notes for May 31

• Apple restructures, removes Steve Jobs
• Microsoft Office XP is released
• Swedish Police raid the Pirate Bay

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Article by Jeffrey Powers @geekazine

Jeffrey has written 381 awesome articles for us at Day in Tech History