Where were the program instructions stored in the eniac

That it happened in the US, not the UK? Those are interesting but relatively insignificant facts. Look instead at the substantial differences between the two events. The original demo program of the Manchester Baby. Does that matter? Historian Doron Swade has asked many computer experts about the importance of programs being in memory. Look at it this way: many modern microprocessors, especially small ones for embedded control, have their programs in ROM.

In the s and s, professional historians shifted the discourse primarily to business, political, and social aspects. This is great new history. Len Shustek is the founding chairman emeritus of the board of trustees of the Computer History Museum. Shustek May 18, Historian of computing and former CHM chief curator Michael Williams famously said that anything can be a first if you put enough adjectives before the noun.

Have a program stored in memory? Have been built? Be general-purpose? That prolly wasn't intentional, but the elision of all references to the big punched card shop Cunningham ran, and to the two relay machines IBM built, certainly was.

Those are what actually did firing tables, after desk calculators were overwhelmed and until the Bell machine arrived, and until ENIAC was moved in and later freed up. Now, about the "I'm dubious Certainly in the hundreds and hundreds of hours he and I talked about those two machines, he never mentioned such, nor did Frank Hamilton, who was Number Two on the ASCC, ever hint at the latter. Gutzwiller [ 90 ] says that Presper Eckert among other well-known pioneers of computing including Aiken and Vannevar Bush got his first inspiration from Wallace Eckert's "orange book".

I have not been able to pin down any evidence of direct contact between the two Eckerts. Using the mouse just kidding. Arthur Burks and Betty Jean Jennings. From a Computer History Museum announcement, 19 September Born on a farm in Missouri, the sixth of seven children, Jean Jennings Bartik always went in search of adventure.

During her college years, WWII broke out, and in , at age 20, Bartik answered the government's call for women math majors to join a project in Philadelphia calculating ballistics firing tables for the new guns developed for the war effort.

Bartik jumped at the chance and was hired as one of the original six programmers of ENIAC, the first all-electronic, programmable computer. With ENIAC's 40 panels still under construction, and its 18, vacuum tube technology uncertain, the engineers had no time for programming manuals or classes.

Bartik and the other women taught themselves ENIAC's operation from its logical and electrical block diagrams, and then figured out how to program it. They created their own flow charts, programming sheets, wrote the program and placed it on the ENIAC using a challenging physical interface, which had hundreds of wires and 3, switches.

It was an unforgettable, wonderful experience. John Mauchly and J.