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Early computer invention ENIAC...



Item # 652725

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December 12, 1947

THE NEW YORK TIMES, December 12, 1947

* Eniac 1 invention (early computer)
* 1st electronic computer
* Aberdeen Proving Ground


Page 21 has one column headings: "COMPUTING 'BRAIN' WILL 'MEMORIZE'" "Machines Shown at Aberdeen Promise to Be Immense Aid to Science and Business" See images for text here. Historic. I suspect this is one of the few publications to report this particular event as other titles in our inventory do not.
Other news, sport and advertisements of the day. Fifty-six pages, a few cutouts on a couple unrelated inside pages, light toning and minor wear at the margins, otherwise good.

wikipedia notes: ENIAC, short for Electronic Numerical Integrator And Computer, was the first general-purpose electronic computer. Precisely, it was the first high-speed, purely electronic, Turing-complete, digital computer capable of being reprogrammed to solve a full range of computing problems, since earlier machines had been built with some of these properties. ENIAC was designed and built to calculate artillery firing tables for the U.S. Army's Ballistic Research Laboratory.


The contract was signed on June 5, 1943 and Project PX was constructed by the University of Pennsylvania's Moore School of Electrical Engineering from July, 1943. It was unveiled on February 14, 1946 at Penn, having cost almost $500,000. 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 of that year, it was turned on and would be in continuous operation until 11:45 p.m. on October 2, 1955.

ENIAC was conceived and designed by John Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert of the University of Pennsylvania. The team of design engineers assisting the development included Bob Shaw (function tables), Chuan Chu (divider/square-rooter), Kite Sharpless (master programmer), Arthur Burks (multiplier), Harry Huskey (reader/printer), and Jack Davis (accumulators).

Category: The 20th Century