Hello Fellow Technophiles,
We have become so accustomed to computers that devices that would have been considered too powerful to even imagine are now commonplace. We don’t even consider items like an iPhone a computer, even though the current generation has processors that would blow away the most powerful machine from just a few years back. And let’s not forget all of the household items from our cars to our washing machines that have imbedded processors in them. Once all of these devices are connected to the so-called “Internet of things” it will truly be a worldwide web.
As this ever faster progress marches on, I want to take a minute to acknowledge one of the ancestors of all of our computers today: ENIAC. Short for Electronic Numerical Integrator And Computer, this machine is considered by some to be the first true general purpose computer. This device cost over six million dollars (adjusted for inflation) and was HUGE. How big? According to Wikipedia:
ENIAC contained 17,468 vacuum tubes, 7200 crystal diodes, 1500 relays, 70,000 resistors, 10,000 capacitors and approximately 5,000,000 hand-soldered joints. It weighed more than 30 short tons (27 t), was roughly 2.4m x 0.9m x 30m (8 × 3 × 100 feet) in size, occupied 167m2 (1800 ft2) and consumed 150 kW of electricity.
ENIAC day is celebrated on February 15th, and this year marked the 70th anniversary of its dedication. To celebrate, I offer this statement in a language ENIAC would understand:
01001000 01100001 01110000 01110000 01111001 00100000 01100010 01101001 01110010 01110100 01101000 01100100 01100001 01111001 00100000 01000101 01101110 01101001 01100001 01100011 00100001