Crash Bang Wallop Pop Compute

Apparently ENIAC, the first working electronic digital computer and the dinosaur of the current lightweight superfast models, is 60 years old this week. By today's standards for electronic computers the ENIAC was a grotesque monster. Its thirty separate units, plus power supply and forced-air cooling, were over 30 meters long and weighed over thirty tons. Its 19,000 vacuum tubes, 1,500 relays, and hundreds of thousands of resistors, capacitors, and inductors consumed almost 200 kilowatts of electrical power. All this for a price of less than 500,000 dollars. It has since been chopped up and put on display in various museums as a prehistoric (by digital standards) electronic display. This was no ordinary desktop Booting it up required a large team to set it up and operate it as it calculated trajectories for missiles. All the programmes had to be hard wired every time they changed the programme. It makes my current frustrations with my somewhat slow computer seem very trivial.