History of Hardware

It would take until the World War II era for Babbage's ideas to be realized. And it is a testimony to the excellence of Babbage's designs that this era also marks the beginning of the astonishing rate of advances in the area of computing that continues to the present day. Interestingly, World War II also marks the era in which the dictionary definition of the word computer shifted from referring to a human being to referring to a machine.

The war effort generated endless amounts of mathematical calculations that needed to be performed. For example, firing artillery involved consulting a firing table in order to know what trajectory to use so that the projectile would travel the needed distance. Much of this calculation work was performed by women (just as women entered the factories during WWII, they left home to perform mathematical labor as well, and many of them stayed in the computer profession after the war).

However, a single firing table took weeks to generate, and thousands were needed. The situation seemed desperate, so much so that the Army agreed to fund construction by J. Presper Eckert and John Mauchly, faculty at the University of Pennsylvania, of what seemed to be a foolhardy idea: an electronic computer.

The machine was developed in secret as a project for the United States military during World War II. The machine was named the ENIAC ("electronic numerical integrator and computer").