[ih] an excursion into the ENIAC, Intel 4004 vs the IMP

[John Levine]

It appears that Jorge Amodio via Internet-history <jmamodio at gmail.com> said:
>Not sure what HP calculator they were looking at but ENIAC as far as I know
>was hardly programmable and it was more time down on maintenance than
>running, perhaps UNIVAC 1?

In the late 1940s when they realized that the IAS machine was making
slow progress, Adele Goldstine, Von Neuman and others figured out a
way to wire ENIAC as a simple stored program computer. It ran Monte
Carlo simulations of nuclear fission triggers for H bombs, with the
code written by his wife Klari.

After 1948 they had high reliability tubes so it could run for a few days
between failures, and find and replaace a failed unit in 15 minutes.  It
was used until 1955 and they even added a small core memory in 1953.

There's an article about it in the April 2014 Annals of the History of Computing.

obInternet: Dave Walden's "The Arpanet IMP Progam: Retrospective and Ressurection" is
in the same issue.

R's,
John