A Disastrous Holiday for the American Economy: Dow Jones Industrial Average (.DJI)

The computer that started it all
One computing innovation IBM had nothing to do with was first revealed to the public on Feb. 14, 1946. That was the day the University of Pennsylvania took the wraps off of ENIAC, the world’s first electronic general-purpose computer. An Associated Press reporter heralded it as the “Robot Calculator [that] Knocks Out Figures Like Chain Lightning” in his headline, noting also that the wondrous new machine might “possibly open the mathematical way to better living for every man.” T.R. Kennedy of The New York Times was less sensational but no less impressed, saying that ENIAC was “heralded as a tool with which to begin to rebuild scientific affairs on new foundations.”

The 30-ton computer occupied a 30-by-50 foot room, its 18,000 vacuum tubes operated by central switchboards. Its fantastic abilities included the ability to, in the Tribune‘s words, “take a five digit number, such as 63,895, and add it to itself 5,000 times in one second. If you did such an addition with pencil, you’d fill space equivalent to two full pages of a newspaper.” The first trial ENIAC completed was said to require the equivalent of a “trained pencil and paper computer” (a mathematician?) 100 years, working eight hours a day, to complete. ENIAC finished in two hours of computing time. The cost of this phenomenal computing power was $400,000, equivalent to $4.7 million today.

We’ve come a long way since ENIAC, at least in terms of computing bang for the buck. An iPhone 4, which fits in your pocket, is a million times faster than ENIAC despite costing more than 60,000 times less when first released. ENIAC was used to calculate the trajectory of ballistic missiles. We use our iPhones to calculate the trajectory at which to fling Angry Birds into pigs. Try explaining that progression to a computer scientist in 1946.

The article A Disastrous Holiday for the American Economy originally appeared on Fool.com and is written by Alex Planes.

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