IEEE Annals of the History of Computing

This article presents a brief overview of the ENIAC and its place in history. In order to indicate where a program was or whether a valve was malfunctioning, the ENIAC engineers attached small bulbs throughout the machine, which could convey this information to the programmers. For the purposes of the public demonstration in 1946, these tiny bulbs were made more prominent by the addition of transl... View full abstract»

This paper was first published in Mathematical Tables and Other Aids to Computation just after the ENIAC was announced in 1946. It was the major source of technical information about the machine for the scientific world of the time. Even today it ranks as one of the classic descriptions of the ENIAC. This paper is reprinted by the kind permission of the American Mathematical Society and the Nation... View full abstract»

After presenting the historiographical background to the ENIAC development, this paper examines the technical history of the machine. The technical section looks at the architecture of the accumulators and the master programmer unit in an attempt to illustrate both the advantages and the shortcomings of the design. In particular a description of a conditional branch mechanism and parallel operatio... View full abstract»

The life experiences of any human influence the way we think and the types of activities in which we engage. This paper examines the early life of J. Presper Eckert, one of the inventors of the ENIAC, and details those experiences which obviously came to influence his contributions to the creation of the ENIAC and subsequent computers. View full abstract»

Our life experiences influence the way we think and the types of activities in which we engage. This paper examines the early life of John Mauchly, one of the inventors of the ENIAC, and details those experiences which came to influence his contributions to the creation of the ENIAC and subsequent computers. View full abstract»

This paper examines the verb "to program" in the context of the ENIAC development to see what light it can shed on the development of the concept, both for the ENIAC and for subsequent stored program computers. View full abstract»