Today is ENIAC Day. It celebrates the first operation of ENIAC at the Univ of Pennsylvania, the World’s first electronic computer in 1946. By MacAuley and Eckert. I was not there, but at age 3, had already mastered the LL3 scale on my K&E slide rule, which I had already linked to the InterNet.
Do a Google on ENIAC and read some of its history. The iPhone you hold in your hand is orders of magnitude more powerful than ENIAC.
Since the ENIAC was so oafish & clunky compared to the iPhone, I’ll celebrate with a collection of PetiteSirahs.
Tom
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I had to look it up.
Here’s o short snoop
The ENIAC, or Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer , was the result of a U.S. government-funded project during World War II to build an electronic computer that could be programmed. The project was based out of the University of Pennsylvania’s Moore School of Engineering.
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basically the world’s first supercomputer that took a significant amount of floor space. nice.
This is wine related? Kobayashi Cab Franc 2021, stunning wine.
My first programming challenge was on a computer that was bigger than the house I lived in and of course using punch cards to do something that might have been faster on paper.
Nothing special for this in my cellar. So usual suspects.
But for those who can get it how about this
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I suspect many of us have tales from the early days of computing.
I was fortunate to be at a school, Canford, in '67 (I think it was its a while ago now lol) where the head of the Maths dept was very innovative and got us started on programming. (Also on the “new maths” which was very new back then and we had the pleasure of doing “O” levels twice, the regular exam in Dec and then as guinea pigs in a pilot test of a new syllabus in June at the usual time).
Our first programs were run on an Eliot computer at Southampton University, I forget the model. We only used this a couple of times due to logistics.
The fun part however was one of the boys parents worked at nearby Winfrith Atomic energy establishment. He arranged time on their English Electric KDF9 for us every Thursday - this was a very cool field trip. There were three of us in the Maths class (double-maths being an acquired taste it seems). We spent the afternoon there punching up our programs, seeing them run and then re-running once we got the output. Especially cool as we got back after dinner and so we had special permission to stop at the only place with food between Winfrith and the school - The Worlds End Pub!! Limit one half pint of beer (real ale though) to go with the ploughmans or fish and chips. And so began my interest in computers! We were using Fortran II and KDF9 autocode (that was an interesting machine as it had stack oriented registers). One of the projects was a program to help the Chemistry dept with a project they were doing.
Those were the days!