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Electronic Numerical Integrator And Computer, was the first large-scale,
electronic, digital computer capable of being reprogrammed to solve a full range of computing problems, although earlier computers
had been built with some of these properties. ENIAC was designed and built to calculate artillery firing tables for the U.S.
Army's Ballistics Research Laboratory. The first problems run on the ENIAC however, were related to the design of the hydrogen
bomb.
ENIAC was conceived and designed by John Mauchly and J. Presper
Eckert of the University of Pennsylvania. The patent for the ENIAC, granted in 1964, was voided by the 1973 decision of the
landmark federal court case Honeywell v. Sperry Rand, putting the invention of the electronic digital computer in the public
domain. The publication of the Honeywell v. Sperry Rand decision coincided with
the event of the Saturday Night Massacre, one of many events in the ongoing Watergate scandal of Richard Nixon's presidency. As a result of the media's focus on Watergate, news of the decision did not attract public attention at the time.
Several tubes burned out almost every day, leaving it nonfunctional
about half the time. By the simple (if expensive) expedient of never turning the machine
off, the engineers reduced ENIAC's tube failures to the more acceptable rate of one tube every two days.
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