“A computer once beat me at chess, but it was no match for me at kick boxing”*…
J. Presper Eckert, foreground left, and John W. Mauchly, leaning against pole, are pictured with the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer (ENIAC) at the University of Pennsylvania in 1946. Mauchly and Eckert were the masterminds behind ENIAC, arguably the first modern computer. When it was fully operational, ENIAC filled up a room 30 x 50 feet and weighed 50 tons. Every second it was on, it used enough electricity to power a typical Philadelphia home for a week and a half.
The ENIAC— or least a good bit of it– has been saved…
Eccentric billionaires are tough to impress, so their minions must always think big when handed vague assignments. Ross Perot’s staffers did just that in 2006, when their boss declared that he wanted to decorate his Plano, Texas, headquarters with relics from computing history. Aware that a few measly Apple I’s and Altair 880’s wouldn’t be enough to satisfy a former presidential candidate, Perot’s people decided to acquire a more singular prize: a big chunk of ENIAC, the “Electronic Numerical Integrator And Computer.” The ENIAC was a 27-ton, 1,800-square-foot bundle of vacuum tubes and diodes that was arguably the world’s first true computer. The hardware that Perot’s team diligently unearthed and lovingly refurbished is now accessible to the general public for the first time, back at the same Army base where it almost rotted into oblivion…
Read the whole story– and see more photos of computing, v1.0– at “How the World’s First Computer Was Rescued From the Scrap Heap.”
* Emo Philips
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As we praise the preservationists, we might recall that it was on this date in 1967 that Jocelyn Bell Burnell and Antony Hewish observed the first pulsar– “pulsating radio star.” A highly-magnetized, rotating neutron star, a pulsar emits a beam of electromagnetic radiation that can only be detected on Earth when it is being beamed in our direction (so seems, from Earth’s vantage, to be pulsing). Pulsars have short, regular rotational periods, so produce the pulses that we detect at very precise intervals.
Schematic view of a pulsar. The sphere in the middle represents the neutron star, the curves indicate the magnetic field lines, the protruding cones represent the emission beams and the green line represents the axis on which the star rotates.