ENIAC
ENIAC Exhibit Project
The main objective of the ENIAC Exhibit Project is to display a selective sample of the Burks collection as a permanent exhibit focusing on the technological background of the computing revolution. The new Information Communications/Technology Complex building at the southwest corner of West Street and Michigan Street that houses the School of Informatics will also house the main exhibit. The Institute for American Thought may feature a smaller exhibit focusing on the intellectual background of the computing revolution. In addition, there may also be a traveling exhibit to serve as an educational outreach program for local public schools and community centers in and around the Indianapolis area. Lastly, the university archives will preserve the documents for the use of scholars and it is hoped that the Indiana State Museum will agree to help house a number of the artifacts.
Preservation and access measures are important to the mission, and the team is considering digitization to achieve some degree of those measures. Part of the collection consists of newsreels and copies of original architectural drawings of the ENIAC's components that are especially earmarked for digitization. There are three newsreels of the 1946 unveiling of the ENIAC, one of which may be an original, and exactly 11 tubes of architectural drawings. In addition, there are a number of documents including copies of the famous "Moore School Lectures" and an original copy of a report by John von Neumann-among the most brilliant minds of the twentieth century-that is considered to be seminal in the development of modern computer architecture. These documents will ultimately be stored in acid-free folders and boxes for long-term preservation and access. Space to store the ENIAC parts and the circuit boards of later generation computers is still being discussed.
ENIAC History
The ENIAC was a child of the Second World War. The army was using a device called the differential analyzer invented by a man named Vannevar Bush to compute firing tables for the artillery. The firing tables, once produced, were sent to the battlefield in North Africa so that artillery units could determine coordinates for firing on specified targets-how high to incline the cannon, what level of charge to use, etc. in various terrestrial and atmospheric circumstances. The problems had to do with time to calculate the tables and level of accuracy. It simply took too long to create the tables given the urgency of war, and the ones that were produced were riddled with human error.
In 1943, a team consisting largely of electrical engineers went to work on what would become the world's first electrical general-purpose computer, the Electrical Numerical Integrator and Computer (ENIAC). To be sure, the ENIAC was not the first electrical computer and this fact emerged later in the form of a controversial patent suit. In the meantime, however, the ENIAC was the most sophisticated computing machine ever built. What distinguished the ENIAC from other computing machines that existed at the time was that it solved arithmetic problems using electric currents through vacuum tubes. Other machines used some variation of the electrical-magnetic rely to send instructions to the machine, much like that used by telegraph companies, but these machines still relied largely on mechanical processes to compute data. The ENIAC's calculations were done exclusively through the use of electrical pulses. The ENIAC was truly an electrical computer.
The ENIAC was also a general-purpose computer, meaning it could be programmed to do other things besides compute firing tables. This distinction made the ENIAC the mother of modern computing and, after the war, useful for scientists. What the ENIAC lacked, however, was equally significant. The most salient problem with the ENIAC was that it did not really have a programmable memory; it could not store programs. This deficiency meant that every time a new problem was put to the ENIAC, a team of programmers had to spend as much as an entire day rewiring cables and turning dials on the machine's panels. By the time designers added memory some seven years later, products of the revolution of which it was the catalyst were already eclipsing the ENIAC.
The subsequent history of computers is nothing short of a technological revolution. In fact, advances in computing were being made while the ENIAC was still in its development stage. John von Neumann, a distinguished mathematician and member of the team that built the ENIAC, was designing what would become the foundation of modern computer architecture before ENIAC was unveiled to the public in 1946. A friend of Neumann was Arthur Burks who has donated to the Peirce Edition Project, among other numerous invaluable artifacts, an original copy of a famous von Neumann report that helped launch the computer revoluation of the twentieth century. Computer pioneers like Arthur Burks have remarked on a number of occasions that what surprised them the most was that computers became so small, so fast, so public, in such a short amount of time.