ENIAC's Tubular Triumph: From 200 to 10,000 Vacuum Tubes
Some very cool facts about ENIAC, the first general purpose electronic computer from the book by Scott McCartney:
Experts in 1940s believed ENIAC was impossible because vacuum tubes cannot be scaled to about 10000 needed for the circuits. Max tubes used at the time was ~200. đ§”
Vacuum tubes were super unreliable and the idea that thousands of them can work together was considered ludicrous. Fortunately, the lead engineer Eckert was rather young, talented and naive. How did he solved this key issue?
Eckert figured out that he can use tubes in on/off mode which allowed to reduce voltage by 10X, increasing life span. Eventually, ENIAC ran ~8 hr at a time before a tube blew. It took month to design program, day to dial in code in 3000 knobs and about week to debug the program.
Even though Eckert knew about binary system, he decided to use decimal arithmetic to reduce number of tubes but complicating the ALU. The programming team of very first computer were all women! They were selected from âhuman computerâ team, people gifted with doing arithmetic.
ENIAC took 2 years to build. It was secret project but too small for army to care too much. In one of the most shocking coincidences, John von Neumann and ENIACâs project member Goldstein happen to travel in same train and bumped into each other.
This is when John von Neumann first learned about general purpose computer. He immediately inserted himself into the project and wrote a paper describing stored program architecture. The problem? He only put himself as author even though these ideas were not his own!
The paper became popular and people started calling it âJohn von Neumann Architectureâ even though it wasnât his idea. Neumann never corrected anyone, took the credit and just stayed silent. However, Neumann was still a visionary and it is astonishing how far he could see.
While everyone looked at ENIAC as fancy programmable calculator, Neumann was the first to describe computer as machine to build neural network, artificial brain and journey towards intelligence even in that very first paper!
Remember, ENIAC had mere 500 FLOPS.
Another coincidence: Writing of this first paper on general purpose computer and the first nuclear explosion Trinity happened around at the same time and at the same place (Los Alamos)! Neumann abstracted away all the concepts so it can be published without divulgingâŠ
It was Neumannâs ambitious vision for AI and his stature that ultimately spurred off race across US and the world to build ever powerful computers. Companies and governments started pouring money even though initial applications remained sketchy.
This is how journey began from 500 FLOPS to todayâs 5000 PFLOPS in just 80 years.
So, why did I suddenly read this book? Well, on a loong 6hr drive, this was the only audiobook I could find that kids were willing to sit through and listen to the story đ.