|
ENIAC ( or ; Electronic Numerical Integrator And Computer)〔John Presper Eckert Jr. and John W. Mauchly, Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer, United States Patent Office, US Patent 3,120,606, filed 26 June 1947, issued 4 February 1964; invalidated 19 October 1973 after court ruling on Honeywell v. Sperry Rand.〕 was the first electronic general-purpose computer. It was Turing-complete, digital, and capable of being reprogrammed to solve "a large class of numerical problems." Though ENIAC was designed and primarily used to calculate artillery firing tables for the United States Army's Ballistic Research Laboratory, its first programs included a study of the feasibility of the hydrogen bomb.〔Scott McCartney p.103 (1999): "ENIAC correctly showed that Teller's scheme would not work, but the results led Teller and Ulam to come up with another design together."〕 When ENIAC was announced in 1946, it was heralded in the press as a "Giant Brain." 〔''Brain'' used in the press as a metaphor became common during the war years. Looking, for example, at Life magazine: August 16, 1937 p.45 ''Overseas Air Lines Rely on Magic Brain'' (RCA Radiocompass). March 9, 1942 p.55 ''the Magic Brain—is a development of RCA engineers'' (RCA Victrola). December 14, 1942 p.8 ''Blanket with a Brain does the rest!'' (GE Automatic Blanket). November 8, 1943 p.8 ''Mechanical brain sights gun'' (How to boss a BOFORS!)〕 It had a speed on the order of one thousand (103) times faster than that of electro-mechanical machines; this computational power, coupled with general-purpose programmability, excited scientists and industrialists alike. ==Development and design== ENIAC's design and construction was financed by the United States Army, Ordnance Corps, Research and Development Command, led by Major General Gladeon M. Barnes. The construction contract was signed on June 5, 1943; work on the computer began in secret at the University of Pennsylvania's Moore School of Electrical Engineering the following month, under the code name "Project PX." ENIAC was designed by John Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert of the University of Pennsylvania, U.S. The team of design engineers assisting the development included Robert F. Shaw (function tables), Jeffrey Chuan Chu (divider/square-rooter), Thomas Kite Sharpless (master programmer), Arthur Burks (multiplier), Harry Huskey (reader/printer) and Jack Davis (accumulators). In 1946, the researchers resigned from the University of Pennsylvania and formed the Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation. ENIAC was a modular computer, composed of individual panels to perform different functions. Twenty of these modules were accumulators, which could not only add and subtract but hold a ten-digit decimal number in memory. Numbers were passed between these units across several general-purpose buses (or ''trays'', as they were called). In order to achieve its high speed, the panels had to send and receive numbers, compute, save the answer and trigger the next operation, all without any moving parts. Key to its versatility was the ability to ''branch''; it could trigger different operations, depending on the sign of a computed result. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「ENIAC」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
|