ENIAC switches on

The first general-purpose electronic computer filled a room, weighed 27 tons, and recalculated artillery tables in seconds instead of days.

Why it matters

Once arithmetic ran at electronic speed, calculation stopped being a bottleneck and became a medium. Von Neumann's stored-program refinement made the machine we still use: instructions in memory, like data.

People

John Mauchly · J. Presper Eckert · John von Neumann

Threads

This event sits on Computation.

Related events

• 1947

  The transistor, three weeks after Christmas

  Bardeen and Brattain demonstrated a point-contact transistor at Bell Labs on December 23, 1947, with Shockley's team driving the solid-state program.

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• c. 820 CE

  Al-Khwarizmi writes al-jabr

  Al-Khwarizmi systematized solving equations in The Compendious Book on Calculation by Completion and Balancing, and popularized Hindu-Arabic numerals.

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• 1971

  A computer on a chip

  Intel's 4004 packed a complete CPU — 2,300 transistors — onto one chip, built for a Japanese calculator and priced accordingly.

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Sources

• Encyclopædia Britannica — ENIAC