The ENIAC
The machine designed by Drs. Eckert and Mauchly was a monstrosity. When it was finished, the ENIAC filled an entire room, weighed thirty tons, and consumed two hundred kilowatts of power. It generated so much heat that it had to be placed in one of the few rooms at the University with a forced air cooling system. Vacuum tubes, over 19,000 of them, were the principal elements in the computer‘s circuitry. It also had fifteen hundred relays and hundreds of thousands of resistors, capacitors, and inductors. All of this electronics were held in forty-two panels nine feet tall, two feet wide, and one foot thick. They were arranged in a “U“ shape, with three panels on wheels so they could be moved around. An IBM card reader and card punch were used respectively for input and output.
The function of the machine was split into eight basic circuit components: the accumulator, initiator, master programmer, multiplier, divider/square-root, gate, buffer, and the function tables. The accumulator was the basic arithmetic unit of the ENIAC. It consisted of twenty registers, each ten digits wide, which performed addition, subtraction, and temporary storage. The accumulator can be compared to the registers in today‘s central processing units.
The initiator performed a few special tasks, including powering up and shutting down the ENIAC, clearing it, and starting computation.
The master programmer controlled execution of programs. While most of the programming was performed manually by setting switches and cable connections, the master programmer unit allowed for altering the program and iteration.
The multiplication and division/square-root circuits were used in conjunction with the accumulator‘s addition, subtraction, and storage capability to perform their respective
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