ENIAC Trivia Questions

Its primary initial purpose was computing firing tables for ballistic trajectories, though it also worked on the hydrogen bomb project.

It achieved about 5,000 additions per second, a huge leap over mechanical calculators, but far slower than a modern smartphone.

It weighed about 27 tons, contained 17,468 vacuum tubes, and consumed 150 kW of power, causing frequent tube failures.

ENIAC had no hard drive or magnetic storage; it relied on punched cards for input and output, and its memory was volatile.

ENIAC had no stored-program memory; it used 20 accumulators that held numbers, making its working memory tiny by modern standards.

That title belongs to the Atanasoff-Berry Computer (ABC), built earlier, though ENIAC was the first general-purpose electronic computer.

ENIAC was programmed by manually setting switches and plugging cables into patch panels, like an old telephone switchboard.

Six women (Kay McNulty, Betty Jennings, and others) were its first programmers, though they received little credit for decades.