Today is February 14th, an ordinary Monday, a very ordinary weekday.
Shi Chao does not know how so many colleagues today have asked for leave, they say that it is to follow the course of history, the reproduction of mankind.
Oh, I just think they don't love work.
Coming to the seat, as usual, Shichao opened "Today in History".
On February 14, 1946, the first general-purpose electronic computer, enIAC, was born.
Well, today is the birthday of the computer!
Then, on this big day, Shi Chao will simply tell you the story of ENIAC.
The rest, let's leave it alone.
EnIAC was originally designed for the United States to deal with the calculation problems in long-range artillery, that is, for the military.
It can do 5000 addition operations per second and multiplication operations 400 times per second. It can also perform square sum and cubic operations, sine and cosine, and some other more complex operations.
Because the computing power is much stronger than the previous computer, a ballistic that used to take 20 minutes to calculate is now only 30 seconds.
It can be said that it alleviated the extremely serious problem of slow calculation at that time, which was a remarkable achievement at that time.
Of course, there are many disadvantages.
The first was a large, complex batch, which the media at the time called "gigantic brains".
How big is it?
Covering an area of 167 square meters and weighing 30 tons, it has 17,468 tubes, 7,200 crystal diodes, 1,500 relays, 10,000 capacitors, and around 5 million hand-soldered heads.
This is not the biggest problem with ENIAC, the basic electronic component it uses, the tube, is the real problem.
EnIAC is equipped with 17468 vacuum tubes that can be used to control the current in the circuit, and its disadvantages are: expensive, slow, and power consumption.
Especially the power consumption, according to the people at the time, as long as this guy turns on, the lights in the whole city will be dimmed.
And that's not all.
Vacuum electron tubes are like porcelain dolls, very easy to break, not bad a few times a day in the heart of panic (some say that every 15 minutes will break one ).
To this end, at that time, several engineers were specially arranged to stare at nearly 18,000 vacuum tubes every day, where they were broken and repaired.
But this is not a solution, it must be bad, and it will take ten minutes to find which one is broken.
Not to mention the engineers, the donkeys of the production team could not help but toss so much.
Later, it was found that most of these damages occurred during the preheating and cooling periods, that is, when the machine was switched on and off.
Eh, the engineer came up with a way to never turn off the computer.
Although it sounds a little strange, you don't have to say that after using this method, it took 2 days to damage an electron tube.
In addition to the tube tossing people, in other ways, ENIAC is not a fuel-efficient lamp.
Just like our computer in order to cool down, need to install air cooling, water cooling.
The big guy at ENIAC must have cooled down as well. It is said that scientists used ice at that time, and the ice cubes consumed every day were calculated in tons.
There's something even harder.
ENIAC is too large and has too many components, and it uses wires that are several kilometers long. Such a long wire, in case it is bitten off by a rat, it will be a headache to find.
In order to prevent this problem, scientists also specifically caught a few rats and locked them up.
Then put in different wires and see which one they like to bite.
It can only be said that every step of the way you use ENIAC, you have to be as careful as a chainsaw to fix your nose hair, and a little attention can give you a cardiac arrest.
But let's get back to that.
Although this big guy is bulky and has a lot of problems, the computing power is placed in front of the smartphone, not even one in a million.
However, the significance of it is indisputable.
Not to mention how much it helped people to calculate mathematics, mechanics and nuclear explosions, it later completed many ballistic calculations and atomic bomb calculations. It is even ended up in weather forecasting, cosmic ray studies and wind tunnel design.
Most importantly, for the first time, it has the three elements of a modern computer: fully programmable, fully electronic, universal to all logical tasks, and the world's first general-purpose computer that can be adapted to a wide range of industries.
One of the founders of ENIAC, the father of modern computers, von Neumann ▼
Later computers developed rapidly, with transistors replacing electron tubes and getting smaller and smaller.
Until 1981, IBM launched the world's first personal computer, the computer gradually entered thousands of households, and eventually became the machine in front of you and me.
To interject here, if you turn to this day in history, you will find that Bell also applied for a telephone patent on 2.14.
Therefore, on February 14 in the future, even if the artillery fire is continuous outside, we must learn not to hear things outside the window.
Because this is the birthday of the computer, this is the day of the telephone patent application.
All we have to do is stay at home, put candles on the console, cream the monitor, seriously give the computer a birthday, and play with it all night.
Otherwise, I just feel noisy.
Author: Hedgehog Editor: Polygon Line
Images, sources:
Baidu Encyclopedia: ENIAC John Eckert
Wikipedia:Electronic numerical integration computer