The ENIAC, the world’s first large-scale electronic general-purpose digital computer, was completed and tested at the Moore School at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia.
With eighteen thousand vacuum tubes and weighing thirty tons, the ENIAC was about one thousand times faster than the Harvard Mark I, and 10,000 times the speed of a human computer doing a calculation.
Programming the ENIAC was accomplished by time-consuming plugging of patch cords from buses to panels for each individual problem.
The ENIAC remained the only operational electronic digital computer in the world until the short-lived Manchester “Baby” prototype became operational in 1948.
