# The Birth of ENIAC: When Computers Got Their Big Break (February 16, 1946)
On February 16, 1946, at the University of Pennsylvania's Moore School of Electrical Engineering, the world got its first public glimpse of a beast that would change everything: the **Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer**, better known as ENIAC (pronounced "EE-nee-ak").
Picture this: A room-sized mechanical monster weighing 30 tons, containing 17,468 vacuum tubes (those glowing glass bulbs that would burn out like lightbulbs at the worst possible moments), 7,200 crystal diodes, 1,500 relays, 70,000 resistors, 10,000 capacitors, and approximately 5 million hand-soldered joints. It consumed 150 kilowatts of electricity—enough to dim the lights of West Philadelphia when switched on. The machine was so hot that its operators had to work in a specially ventilated room, and legend has it that when ENIAC was turned on, lights across the city would flicker.
But here's the kicker: this behemoth could perform 5,000 additions per second. Today, your smartphone would laugh at that speed while simultaneously streaming cat videos, but in 1946? This was **witchcraft-level computing power**.
ENIAC was originally conceived to calculate artillery firing tables for the U.S. Army during World War II—mind-numbingly complex ballistic trajectory calculations that would take human "computers" (yes, that was an actual job title for people, mostly women, who did calculations by hand) weeks to complete. ENIAC could do them in hours, or even minutes.
The public demonstration on that February day was a showstopper. The machine calculated the trajectory of an artillery shell in just 20 seconds—faster than the shell itself would have traveled! Attendees watched in amazement as ENIAC computed a problem in nuclear physics that would have taken human calculators 100 years to solve, finishing it in just two hours.
What makes this story even better is that much of ENIAC's actual programming work was done by six brilliant women: Kay McNulty, Betty Jennings, Betty Snyder, Marlyn Wescoff, Fran Bilas, and Ruth Lichterman. In a frustrating twist of history, they weren't even invited to the celebratory dinner after the public unveiling, and their crucial contributions were largely overlooked for decades. They had to physically rewire the machine to "program" it—no keyboards, no monitors, just plug boards and switches. They essentially invented programming on the fly.
ENIAC wasn't technically the first electronic computer (Britain's Colossus machines, used to crack Nazi codes, predated it but remained classified), but it was the first general-purpose, programmable electronic computer made known to the public. It kicked off the modern computing age, leading directly to the machines that would land humans on the moon, map the human genome, and eventually allow you to argue with strangers on the internet.
The machine ran until October 2, 1955, and in its lifetime, it performed more calculations than all of humanity had done before 1946. Not bad for a room full of hot vacuum tubes!
So on this day 80 years ago, the digital revolution began with a flip of a switch and a power surge in Philadelphia. Happy birthday, ENIAC—you glorious, electricity-guzzling grandfather of all our modern gadgets!
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This content was created in partnership and with the help of Artificial Intelligence AI
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