What is electronic numeric indicator and calculator
? What was unique about it?
Answers
Answer:
One of the world's first fully operational electronic digital computer is developed by Army Ordnance to compute World War II ballistic firing tables.
By Martin H. Weik, 1961
Ordnance Ballistic Research Laboratories, Aberdeen Proving Ground, MD
"...With the advent of everyday use of elaborate calculations, speed has become paramount to such a high degree that there is no machine on the market today capable of satisfying the full demand of modern computational methods. The most advanced machines have greatly reduced the time required for arriving at solutions to problems which might have required months or days by older procedures. This advance, however, is not adequate for many problems encountered in modern scientific work and the present invention is intended to reduce to seconds such lengthy computations..."
From the ENIAC patent (No. 3,120,606), filed 26 June 1947.
editors note:
The 1946, ENIAC Computer was long thought to have been the first electronic computer and the inventors, J. Presper Eckert and John W. Mauchly were the first to patent a digital computing device - - but a 1973, patent infringement case (Sperry Rand Vs. Honeywell), voided the ENIAC patent as a derivative of Atanasoff's invention. (5)
As in many others along the road of technological progress, the stimulus which initiated and sustained the effort that produced the ENIAC (electronic numerical integrator and computer) was provided by the extraordinary demand of war to find the solution to a task of surpassing importance. To understand this achievement, which literally ushered in an entirely new era in this century of startling scientific accomplishments, it is necessary to go back to 1939.
As the year 1939 dawned on an apprehensive and fearful Europe, soon to realize the worst of its fears with the outbreak of the war on September 1st, the United States continued largely oblivious to the outside world and its impending fate. This obliviousness was in no way better exemplified than in the size and state of unreadiness of the U.S. Army.
Two decades of complete indifference toward military preparedness had witnessed its virtual elimination as a factor of any military consequence in the world. In that fateful year the total strength of the Regular Establishment of the Army was approximately 120,000 officers and men.
The part of this exceedingly small peacetime establishment which provided the principal scientific and logistic support was the Ordnance Department. This Department had the responsibility for the design, development, procurement, storage, and issue of all combat materiel and munitions for the Army. In 1939 it was staffed by a relative handful of officers and career civilian employees.
The only scientific facility then available to the Ordnance Department for carrying out experimentation with weapons was the Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland. This facility had been acquired at the beginning of World War I and had been heroically maintained during the disheartening interim period so that at the outbreak of World War II it was able single-handedly to perform the crucial task of testing all combat materiel during the critical period of mobilization of the American war effort.
One of the extraordinarily important tasks which devolved upon the proving ground was the preparation of firing and bombing tables for the Army which at that time, of course, included the Army Air Corps. This responsibility was carried out at the Ballistic Research Laboratory of the Ordnance Department at Aberdeen. Here also were obtained experimental data of high accuracy and precision, necessary to the computation of the firing and bombing tables.
What was the situation at the Ballistic Research Laboratory on the eve of World War II? Its computing group comprised just a handful of civilian employees of the Ordnance Department. These individuals were well trained and highly skilled in the conventional methods of computation of firing and bombing tables. Available to this group at that time was one important calculating device other than standard desk calculators--this was the Bush differential analyzer.
This analogue device, or continuous variable calculator, had been installed at the proving ground about five years previously under the direction of Major James Guion of the Ordnance Department, then head of the ballistic computations section of the proving ground.
The officer in charge of ballistic computations at that time was Lieutenant P. N. Gillon, Ordnance Department, who had just assumed responsibility for ballistic computations at the outbreak of the war in Europe. His immediate recognition of the immensity of the task that would devolve upon the Ordnance Department in the event of America's involvement in the war prompted him to seek both marked improvement in mechanical aids to computation and augmented facilities for their accomplishment.
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Answer:
ENIAC Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer)was the first electronic general-purpose digital computer.It was Turing-complete, and able to solve "a large class of numerical problems" through reprogramming.
Although ENIAC was designed and primarily used to calculate artillery firing tables for the United States Army's Ballistic Research Laboratory (which later became a part of the Army Research Laboratory), its first program was a study of the feasibility of the thermonuclear weapon.
ENIAC was completed in 1945 and first put to work for practical purposes on December 10, 1945.
ENIAC was formally dedicated at the University of Pennsylvania on February 15, 1946 and was heralded as a "Giant Brain" by the press.It had a speed on the order of one thousand times faster than that of electro-mechanical machines; this computational power, coupled with general-purpose programmability, excited scientists and industrialists alike. The combination of speed and programmability allowed for thousands more calculations for problems, as ENIAC calculated a trajectory in 30 seconds that took a human 20 hours (allowing one ENIAC hour to displace 2,400 human hours).The completed machine was announced to the public the evening of February 14, 1946 and formally dedicated the next day at the University of Pennsylvania, having cost almost $500,000 (approximately $6,300,000 today). It was formally accepted by the U.S. Army Ordnance Corps in July 1946. ENIAC was shut down on November 9, 1946 for a refurbishment and a memory upgrade, and was transferred to Aberdeen Proving Ground, Maryland in 1947. There, on July 29, 1947, it was turned on and was in continuous operation until 11:45 p.m. on October 2, 1955.