Saving The ENIAC Computer

One of the world’s first computers was ENIAC, which stands for the “Electronic Numerical Integrator And Computer.” It weighed 27 tons. Yes you read this correctly it weighed about 54,000 pounds. It was no laptop or desktop, it was a machine that filled one or more large rooms. It took up 1800 square feet and was powered by vacuum tubes. One of the reasons it was so heavy beside its frame was the reason it had 17,468 tubes. It turned out this was left on an army base and was rotting away when perhaps it should have been in a museum. I am sure many of us would have loved to have seen it in the flesh, so to speak. The machine was built during World War II with the purpose of calculating the trajectory of artillery shells, something which we probably could do today with a pocket calculator. The problem was the computer wasn’t finished until November 1945 but the war had ended in September 1945.

The machine was not announced to the general public until 1946, but when it was, it excited the scientific community, after all it was about 1,000 times faster than any mechanical devices. The code name for the project had been Project PX. It had cost $500,000 to build and in today’s cost would be something over $6,000,000. It was handed over to the U.S. Army Ordnance Corps in July 1946 but shut down in November 1946 for refurbishment and a memory upgrade. It was then sent to the Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland in 1947. When they turned it on it ran continuously until October 2, 1955. The machine was used to determine if a hydrogen bomb could be made. I guess it succeeded in that venture.

Maybe one of the most important things about ENIAC was the design. It had been designed to be modular, paving the way for even more efficient modular designs. Because it was modular it could work on several parts of a problem at once. If you wanted to store one digit it took 36 tubes to do it. It had twenty 10 digit accumulators. Four accumulators controlled by a multiplier unit could perform 385 operations per second when multiplying. This was a far cry from what we can do on our cell phones today, or even a cheap calculator. One has to wonder if when the ENIAC was first imagined it was ever thought it would become a modern computer rather than just a device to track shells. Could this have been a secret wish of the designer? One of the problems with this machine was the fact several tubes would burn out every day so a hefty supply of them was needed. Another problem was wires had to be connected to run specific programs. Can you imagine having to make complicated connections on a machine every time you wanted to run a problem? I wonder how many times a wire was hooked up wrong and took a while to find?

Programmers had their work cut out for them. It would take them weeks or longer to map out the connections to run a program on the machine. It would then take days to place the wires in the correct spot. This was not a job for the faint of heart. I am always amazed when I see the photo of women standing in front of one of the control panels and plugging wires into the slots. It just goes to show how grateful we should be for the keyboard. If it wasn’t for the invention of the keyboard most of us would never have computers at home, after all who would want to be bothered running wires every time we wanted to do something? I can see it now, somebody wanting to do a Google search and having to hook up 100 wires. The chances are they would say forget it.

Here we are with this huge machine dying a slow rusty death, one of the most historic computers in history and no one is paying any attention to it. About the best thing I can say at this point is at least it wasn’t sent to the scrap heap. All this was about to change however and that was because of a famous billionaire, one who had run an unsuccessful race for president. This billionaire said he wanted to decorate with historical computer memorabilia. He told his staff he would not be happy with the run of the mill early Apples or an Amiga or two so they began to search around for something memorable. This was in 2006. As they looked for something they came across ENIAC and decided to buy a big piece of it. I am not clear if that is all there was at the time or the entire package might have been too large, but suffice it to say they got a nice sized piece of the machine. The next thing they did was have it renovated. I can’t help but think how large this man’s headquarters had to be to house something like this as a decoration. Can you imagine telling your wife I got a decoration for our home, it takes up hundreds of square feet and weighs several tons. That would take up most of my home, I don’t know about you, but of course we are not talking about putting it into a home.

Anyway they got the pieces of the machine and they were refurbished and sent to his Plano, Texas headquarters. I am wondering if you know who I am talking about yet, I have given you a few clues. To continue the story this historical piece of hardware which was deemed to be the first digital computer, was later sent to the same U.S. Army base where it was found so the public can now view it. In case you haven’t figured out who I am talking about it was Ross Perot. Whether you agree with his politics or not, it was a great thing he did with the computer since our computing history is something which should be saved for posterity. There are quite a few collections out there of early home computers and business computers, but when it comes down to the giant early computers how many are still around? It is just too bad the entire machine could not have been found and restored, you would have thought a museum would have been interested in doing this, it seems like the perfect project for the Smithsonian.

It was said the toughest part of the restoration project was piecing the frame back together since it was far more elaborate than was ever expected. There is still more restoration work to be done on other parts which are available and one has to wonder if anyone is still around who worked with this computer, it would be interesting to hear what they would have to say about it.