Debugging the ENIAC [Scanning Our Past]

Abstract

Unveiled to the public in February 1946, the Electronic Numerical Integrator And Computer (ENIAC) was a major milestone in the history of computing. It served as a national computing resource from its completion in late 1945s until its retirement in 1955. During that time, it was used for a wide variety of applications, including number theory, supersonic air flow, ballistic trajectories, and nuclear weapon simulations [1]. The ENIAC was built at the University of Pennsylvania for the U.S. Army under the leadership of John Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert, beginning in 1943. Although it was used for a wide variety of applications, the original motivation for its construction and justification for the cost of the project was computing artillery trajectories for World War II. Between being a training ground for many early computing pioneers and being a testbed for techniques, such as sequential instruction execution [2], [3], the ENIAC's influence went beyond even its utilitarian contributions.