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ENIAC stuff
15 years ago
ENIAC was the first all electronic computer built after WWII in 1946. It weighed 30 tons and was kept in a gymnasium. The CPU was made up of 17,000 vacuum tubes (of the radio kind, as computer ones were not yet invented) which burned out very rapidly and had to be continuously maintained by women pushing carts of tubes around.
ENIAC stood for Electronic Numeral Integrator And Computer, was used to plot the movement of missiles, and could process about 8000 numbers per second.
My friend's Grandfather was one of the people who helped design it. It was programmed by manipulating hundreds of wires to get the desired result which took hours and sometimes days.
The reason I posted this is because I first read about it when I was 9 years old but until now I had no idea exactly how much memory it had. At lest until yesterday.
The answer: About 80 characters of information, or 80 bytes I suppose.
It blew my mind that there ever existed a computer like that and it makes me appreciate it even more. To think that a 30 ton machine made up of 17,000 radio tubes and required constant care couldn't even store the amount of characters in a tweet!! or even a shout box here on FA!
And 1946 wasn't even that long ago, so it really shows how far we've come in such a short time.
ENIAC stood for Electronic Numeral Integrator And Computer, was used to plot the movement of missiles, and could process about 8000 numbers per second.
My friend's Grandfather was one of the people who helped design it. It was programmed by manipulating hundreds of wires to get the desired result which took hours and sometimes days.
The reason I posted this is because I first read about it when I was 9 years old but until now I had no idea exactly how much memory it had. At lest until yesterday.
The answer: About 80 characters of information, or 80 bytes I suppose.
It blew my mind that there ever existed a computer like that and it makes me appreciate it even more. To think that a 30 ton machine made up of 17,000 radio tubes and required constant care couldn't even store the amount of characters in a tweet!! or even a shout box here on FA!
And 1946 wasn't even that long ago, so it really shows how far we've come in such a short time.
"Poor him, he always was about to solve the problem... and he always ran out of memory. So we had to write down its memory, (on paper I suppose) and reset it to start the second phase of calculations"
Hmm, you're making me want to reinstall BOINC on my computer and start running work units for SETI again.
Today's processors can operate at 2.5-5 billion instructions per second