ENIAC ....

Oh boy, let's argue the "first computer" question again.... This site promote the hoary old argument that the ABC wasn't really a computer, but ENIAC was. From what I've read of both machines, the ABC can't be seen to be less of a computer than ENIAC - although it was certainly less successful. The argument of this website is that the ABC was nothing more than a calculator. I would suggest that both ABC and ENIAC were in fact computers of limited application, to wit, the calculation of complex and repetitive arithmetic, and both were originally designed for particular purposes. ENIAC was later programmed for other arithmetic tasks, and perhaps that would have been possible with the ABC as well - but history suggests that the ABC just wasn't very well built (it didn't have federal dollars behind it!) and was not as robust as one might hope. But robust and popular or flaky and obscure, the factual history - not the mud-slinging against documentarian Smiley for what may well have been sloppy journalism - seems to suggest that the ABC was the first of the genre, "electronic digital computer," as limited as those initial machines were - all of them. The fact that Colossus was purpose-built and served to decipher codes should not take away from the importance of its design. It was possibly as 'programmable' as the ENIAC, but the scope of programming development was somewhat limited by fear of annihilation at the hands of the Nazi regime. One must wonder what would have become of it had its destruction not been ordered and its very existence declared a state secret. I think ENIAC's overwhelming historical importance was the conversations it started. It was not an obscure project by a college professor of physics nor a super-secret defense project (although it did start out that way, it later became an 'open' secret), and its significance was more about why it wasn't all it could be than what it was. Von Neumann's observations would likely not have occurred without the context of the ENIAC, nor would the interest in the potential of information technology have been quite so stoked. I wonder how history would have been written if Atanasoff had been more interested in fame and fortune than in quantum physics, or if he and Berry had been (or could have hired) better engineers. The Eckstein citation on this site does not constitute scholarship, just recursively poor journalism. It's a shame this site diminishes an otherwise worthwhile goal of celebrating the ENIAC by regurgitating an old, emotional and unsupported argument. ENIAC was far more important to history, but that does not mean we must disregard history that demonstrates it was not first of its class. (First "general purpose" machine? Clearly later, with EDSAC/EDVAC/UNIVAC, which were deliberately built by principle to be computers and to subsequently fulfill specific roles at the behest of their programmers.) -- Ian ________________________________________ From: cctalk-bounces at classiccmp.org [cctalk-bounces at classiccmp.org] On Behalf Of Evan Koblentz [evan at snarc.net] Sent: Saturday, January 22, 2011 4:15 PM To: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts Subject: ENIAC .... Hi all -- Obviously no one here "collects" the ENIAC, but it's certainly old enough to be on-topic. :) Having said that, here is a new site devoted to ENIAC -- www.the-eniac.com -- the six orange links up top are packed solid with useful information. Disclosure: it's NOT my site, but I was involved in its creation.