“ENIAC in Action,” a book by Thomas Haigh, associate professor of Information Studies, and researchers Mark Priestley and Crispin Rope tells the story of the first general-purpose programmable electronic computer.
ENIAC (the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer) was conceived in 1943, completed in 1945, and decommissioned in 1955. It was more than just a milestone on the road to the modern computer. ENIAC calculated sines and cosines and tested for statistical outliers, plotted the trajectories of bombs and shells, and ran the first numerical weather simulations.
“ENIAC in Action” covers ENIAC’s design, construction and testing – to its afterlife as part of computing folklore. It highlights the complex relationship of ENIAC and its designers to the revolutionary approaches to computer architecture and coding first documented by John von Neumann in 1945.
The authors emphasize the crucial but previously neglected years of 1947 to 1948, when ENIAC was reconfigured to run what the authors claim was the first modern computer program to be executed: a simulation of atomic fission for Los Alamos researchers. The authors view ENIAC from diverse perspectives – as a machine of war, as the “first computer,” as a material artifact constantly remade by its users, and as a subject of (contradictory) historical narratives.
The book is scheduled to be available in late January from the MIT Press.
