The first generation of computers (1946 – 1958) were vacuum tube based. Vacuum tube based computers were massive in size, slow, expensive, and not very reliable.
In 1944 the first successful high-speed electronic computer went into service. The ENIAC – Electronic Numerical Integrator And Computer was developed by J. Presper Eckert and John W. Mauchly, for the U.S. military. ENIAC was comprised of 17,500 vacuum tubes and had a foot print of approximately 1800 square feet. The massive machine weighed 30 tons and consumed 160 kilowatts of electricity. To put that size in perspective, today one microchip can do more than the ENIAC.
Instructions were programmed into the ENIAC using a combination of plugboard wiring and three “portable function tables”. Used for entering tables of numeric data, each function table was comprised of 1200 ten-way switches. It would take a team of programmers days to program the ENIAC, with several more days of error checking required before a problem could be run.
In 1951 Remington Rand produced the UNIVAC – Universal Automatic Computer, the first commercially successful electronic digital computer. While competitors were still using punch cards to program their computers, the UNIVAC ran on magnetic tape.
Andre Pedraza's CSCI-120 Term Project 