The ENIAC
1942: The ENIAC
The ENIAC, short for Electrical Numerical Integrator and Calculator, was developed
by the US Government to fill the increasing need for computer capacity to calculate trajectory tables
and other essential data.
Following the principles of Babbage's Difference Engine, the ENIAC could only be programmed by
presetting switches and rewiring the entire system for each new program or calculation. Although the
computer language had moved from the physical motion of Babbage's engine to that of electrical signals,
the ENIAC wasn't without its limitations.
The ENIAC used 18,000 vacuum tubes, about 1,800 square feet of floor space, and consumed about 180,000
watts of electrical power. It had punched card I/O, 1 multiplier, 1 divider/square rooter, and 20
adders using decimal ring counters, which served as adders and also as quick-access (.0002 seconds)
read-write register storage. The executable instructions making up a program were embodied in the
separate "units" of ENIAC, which were plugged together to form a "route" for the flow of information.
In use from 1946 to 1955, the ENIAC is commonly accepted as the first successful high-speed electronic digital computer (EDC).
1945: The Von Neuman Concepts
Fascinated with the success of the ENIAC, a mathematician by the name of John von
Neumann begins development of two important concepts that would directly affect the path of computer
programming languages forever.
Von Neumann, who lived from 1903-1957, was working at the Institute for Advanced Study when he became
fascinated by the success of the ENIAC. This fascination would lead him to undertake an abstract study
of computation that showed that a computer should have a very simple, fixed physical structure, and
yet be able to execute any kind of computation by means of a proper programmed control without the
need for any change in the unit itself.
The first concept, known as "shared-program technique", stated that the actual
computer hardware should be simple and not need to be hand-wired for each program. Instead, complex
instructions should be used to control the simple hardware, allowing it to be reprogrammed much faster.
The second concept, named "conditional control transfer", gave rise to the notion of subroutines, or
small blocks of code that could be jumped to in any order, instead of a single set of chronologically
ordered steps for the computer to take. Von Neumann continued by stating that the computer code
should be able to branch based on logical statements such as IF (expression) THEN, and looped such as
with a FOR statement. This concept would later give rise to the idea of "libraries", or blocks of
code that can be reused over and over.
1945: The "Bug" is Born
Grace Murray Hopper, who lived from 1906-1992, found the first computer bug while working in a temporary World War I building at Harvard University on the Mark I computer where a moth had been beaten to death in the jaws of a relay. She glued it into the logbook of the computer and thereafter when the machine stops (frequently) they say that they are "debugging" the computer. The very first bug still exists in the National Museum of American History of the Smithsonian Institution. The word bug and the concept of debugging had been used previously, perhaps by Edison, but this was probably the first verification that the concept applied to computers.
1946: Plankalkul
Konrad Zuse, a German engineer who lived from 1910-1995, develops Plakalkul while working alone while hiding out in the Bavarian Alps. He applies the language to, among other things, chess. Plakalkul was developed for Konrad's Z series of relay computers which used binary arithmetic. During World War II he had applied to the German Government for assistance in building his machines, but he was turned down on the basis that it would take longer to complete his work than the government expected the war to last. Eventually he fled to Hinterstein at the end of the war and then to Switzerland where he reconstructed his Z-4 machine at the University of Zurich and founded a computer company that was eventually absorbed into the Siemens Corporation.
1949: Short Code
Although it is a "hand-compiled" language, Short Code is the first computer language actually used on an electronic computing device. The programmer was required to, by hand, change its statements into 0's and 1's for the processor to understand.
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