Rows of switches and scores of cables and plugs handled all of ENIAC's programming functions.

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Still, the military had the money and Cold War problems that would keep ENIAC busy.

CNN: Gore re-boots ENIAC

Presper Eckert , co-creator of the world's first large-scale computer, known as the ENIAC.

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In 1950, a small company in Philadelphia, launched by the ENIAC's inventors -- J.

CNN: Genesis of the computer

America's ENIAC computer calculated artillery trajectories, while Britain's Colossus computer decoded the Nazi's encrypted messages.

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Different in the way the silicon chip is different than the Eniac computer.

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The military drove the development of the earliest computers such as the ENIAC, seeking faster, more accurate ways to perform mathematical and scientific calculations.

CNN: Genesis of the computer

However, says Ensmenger, the presence of these women did not indicate that managers of the ENIAC project had modern attitudes toward women in the workforce.

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Attending was John Mauchly who, before Prof Randell took to the stage, thought that the machine he built, Eniac, was one of the first electronic computers.

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But ENIAC was anything but fast or easy to program.

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The world was at war when ENIAC was designed, and the Army could not calculate fast enough the firing tables needed to predict trajectories of weapons used against German forces.

CNN: Gore re-boots ENIAC

Eckert, named in 1982 by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc. as the engineer of the century, was clearly the engineering muscle behind the ENIAC and the Univac.

CNN: Genesis of the computer

By the time ENIAC was turned off for the last time, in the fall of 1955, its creators had a new, faster, and far more flexible computer, UNIVAC, up and running.

CNN: Gore re-boots ENIAC

So while ENIAC's creators wanted to use their new computer to help predict the weather or the stock market, it wound up helping America's fledgling space program get off the ground.

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Unless you fancy using three different machines to run Word, Excel and PowerPoint, give credit to the fathers of Eniac, the first reprogrammable computer: John Mauchly, Presper Eckert and John von Neumann.

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"Mauchly was the kind of guy who thought with his mouth open, " says his widow, Kay Mauchly Antonelli, who became one of the world's first computer programmers when she worked on the ENIAC.

CNN: Genesis of the computer