Discussion
ENIAC, the First General-Purpose Digital Computer, Turns 80
gerikson: > The computer contained about 18,000 vacuum tubes, which were cooled by 80 air blowers. More than 30 meters long, it filled a 9 m by 15 m room and weighed about 30 kilograms. It consumed as much electricity as a small town.Surprisingly light though...
rvz: Unfortunately, if the subject doesn't have "AI", no one cares.
xattt: It has IA in its name so that must count for something.
embedding-shape: That's AI in Spanish, so checks out in large parts of the world :)
Rochus: Eniac was indeed impressive and an important milestone. I recommend the 1999 book "ENIAC - The triumphs and tragedies of the world's first computer" by Scott McCartney which is both interesting to read and very informative. Also the review of the book by the late Jean Bartik, one of the "computers" and thus an eyewitnmess, is very interesting: https://web.archive.org/web/20221101120020/https://www.amazo....Though the article is very US focussed, keeping quiet that German engineer Konrad Zuse completed the Z3 in May 1941, five years before ENIAC, effectively creating the world's first working programmable and fully automatic digital computer. While ENIAC required days of manual cable patching to program, Zuse had already developed Plankalkül between 1942 and 1945, which is widely recognized as the world's first high-level programming language. The cooperation between Zuse and ETH Zurich eventually led to the first self-compiling compiler and eventually Algol 60 (see "The European Side of the Last Phase of the Development of ALGOL 60" by Peter Naur in ACM SIGPLAN "History of Programming Languages" from 1978). And there was also the British Colossus, which successfully utilized vacuum tubes for code-breaking by early 1944.
guenthert: But afaik Plankalkül wasn't used to program the Z3 (or much anything).I don't want to get into this pity "who was first" argument, but I think there is consensus that the Z3 had little or no influence on further development (no doubt partly due to the war).
