国立アメリカ歴史博物館さんのインスタグラム写真 - (国立アメリカ歴史博物館Instagram)「75 years ago today, on February 15, 1946, the first programmable, fully electronic general-purpose computer, the ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer) was dedicated at the University of Pennsylvania. The ENIAC was major a milestone in the history of computing technology. Designed by John Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert, the ENIAC was in use during World War II at the United States Army Ballistics Research Laboratory, where it performed top-secret calculations for artillery fire and for testing the feasibility of a nuclear bomb. The ENIAC took up an entire room and was programmed by a group of women who came to intimately know the machine, inside and out. What set the ENIAC apart from earlier computing machines was its fully electronic functionality. It was outfitted with 18,000 glass vacuum tubes, which controlled the flow of electric current throughout the machine, enabling it to perform complex mathematical equations in a few minutes—a fraction of the time it would have taken to calculate the same equation by hand, or even mechanically. In the 1940s and 1950s, computer scientists and the popular press called large mainframe electronic computers like the ENIAC “giant brains” or “mechanical brains” for their ability to quickly process and store information. In the early 1960s, our museum (then called the Museum of History and Technology) acquired several parts of the ENIAC and displayed the computer in the early museum’s Information Technology Gallery. The ENIAC was also featured in the major exhibition, The Information Age, which was on view from 1990 to 2006. 1: Two ENIAC programmers (Frances Bilas and Betty Jean Jennings) at the Moore School of Electrical Engineering, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, undated 2: Blueprint of ENIAC’s master programmer front panel, 1944 3: ENIAC displayed at the Information Technology exhibit at the Museum of History and Technology (now @amhistorymuseum) [📷: @smithsonianarchives] 4: Installation of the ENIAC in The Information Age exhibition, on view at @amhistorymuseum from 1990 to 2006. #History #AmericanHistory #ComputerHistory #WomensHistory」2月16日 1時52分