A book co-written by UWM’s Thomas Haigh tells the story of ENIAC, the legendary first programmable computer.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\u201cENIAC in Action\u201d covers ENIAC\u2019s design, construction and testing \u2013 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.<\/p>\n
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 \u2013 as a machine of war, as the \u201cfirst computer,\u201d as a material artifact constantly remade by its users, and as a subject of (contradictory) historical narratives.<\/p>\n
The book is scheduled to be available in late January from the MIT Press.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
\u201cENIAC in Action,\u201d 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":839,"featured_media":27094,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":"","uwm_wg_additional_authors":[]},"categories":[174,200,175],"tags":[],"section":[],"display_categories":[],"related-coverage":[],"uwmnews-feed":[347,165],"class_list":["post-27091","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","category-news-in-brief","category-research","uwmnews-feed-community-engagement-professions","uwmnews-feed-information-studies"],"yoast_head":"\n
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<\/a>