ENIAC

ELECTRONIC NUMERICAL INTEGRATOR AND CALCULATOR

The Electronic Numerical Integrator and Calculator (Eniac), was only a dream in the 40s. My interest in computers goes way back to the late 50s to the ENIAC. I had been a Ham Operator since 1955 (K4EVY), when I was still in high school. There was no such thing as a personal computer then.

But, my excitement about computers really began when I saw the first computer, the ENIAC, at Aberdeen Proving Grounds in Maryland in the 50s. I was in military school in Georgia then but on one of our family visits to Pennsylvania and Maryland my uncle invited me to see his laboratory and the ENIAC.

As early as the 40s (1943) scientists at the University of Pennsylvania proposed a machine which would calculate "firing tables" - settings used for directing artillery under varying conditions vis-a-vis weather, distance to the target, etc. to be used for aiming artillery, which up to that time sometimes took hours to calculate. That is when the computer age was actually launched.

The ENIAC, which weighed 30 tons,
was funded by the U.S. Army.

Dr. Goldstine lobbied a committee headed by Oswald Veblen, mathematician, who influenced the army to go forward with funding at the Aberdeen Proving Grounds (in 1943) with a request for half a million dollars to pay for the research and the computer. Up to that time the army had been shipping their guns without firing tables. Col Leslie E. Simon was then the director of the Army's Ballistics Laboratory, where my uncle worked. Simons retired as a general. Dr. Goldstine was in charge of the operation for the army. A team of scientists and engineers at Penn's Moore School built the computer. The project was secret.

After three years of military school and one year of regular high school I enlisted in the army. It was there that I was selected for a secret assignment and after extensive investigations by the FBI and the Secret Service I worked at the White House for the President of the United States. I had a top secret clearance but also a crypto and nuclear clearance. I was privy to everything the President said and later on the Chiefs of Staff ("need to know" was extended to everything I heard). In the 60s I worked in the War Room for the Chiefs of Staff at the Pentagon (before going to helicopter school and before the Yom Kipper War in 73).

My uncle was a physicist who died when he was only about 49 years old from a cardiac condition but while he was employed as a scientist for the army he invented the fastest camera in the world and he used the very first computer in the ballistics lab at the base, which was also his research facility for developing munitions for the military.

In 1957 I enlisted in the army
because a war was about to start
and I wanted to get in on it.

One of the most exciting days of my life however was when I saw the world's first computer, the ENIAC in the 50s, which was built at the Ballistic Research Laboratory at Aberdeen Proving Ground, Maryland, and was funded by the Ordnance Corps of the United States Army.

My memory is admittedly a bit vague by now, because it was such a long time ago, but I do remember, the ENIAC used thousands of vacuum tubes and generated a lot of heat. Obviously there was very little memory and it was extremely slow.

Later on a subsequent tour of duty in the War Room at the Pentagon, just down the hall from where I worked they were using a newer generation computer, which still used tubes - and I recall how huge it was also and all those diode multipliers and bullion adders with their flashing lights. I also remember the heat and an array of tubes which military personnel were constantly replacing as they burned out. It seemed like that was their only job. To this day I don't know what this equipment was used for. But I do know the tubes were a problem and RCA had to develop a new tube which had a longer life just for the application there at the Pentagon.

I worked cryptology in the War Room and my equipment used mechanical coding wheels and also used tubes. The wheels were metal rings which had to be lined up in exactly the same configuration and started exactly at the same time as those who we communicated with in the Six Fleet or where-ever they were. Army Security Agency (ASA) kept trying to break our codes but they couldn't.

These were not text devices. They generated synthesized speech which did not sound at all like the person using them - and speech was encrypted. We were armed with sawed off shotguns. And we not only guarded the equipment, we swept the room for bugs and we monitored all of the speech.

My job was the same at the White House when I did a three year tour there but included other things, a lot of other things and my training was at Ft Monmouth and at NSA. I worked in all kinds of communications including the first television hookups for the White House, which we assisted in the engineering process. I taught single sideband and various types of multiplexing, including packet communications when it was new.

ENIAC was the first electronic computer which could compute a trajectory in only one second (pretty damn fast when it took an hour before the computer was developed). It was completed in 1945 and it was very BIG. It was enormous. The system was 80 feet long and was 8 feet high. It contained 18,000 vacuum tubes. The speed was 100,000 pulses per second.

It didn't really begin to calculate firing tables until the war was over since it took so long to build. From the time it was imagined in 43 to the time it was completed in 1945.

It became public in 1946. It was built at the Moore school and moved to Aberdeen in 1947 where it was utilized until 1955.

When I finally left the military I went to school under the G.I.Bill and I got an LL.B degree but I also studied programming and systems design. I learned COBOL, RPG, Lisp, BASIC and various other languages, including assembly code. I built and owned several computers and all of the first ones I learned to program them using their individual machine language. In those days that was not uncommon. COBOL was probably my favorite programming language because although bulky it was plain English and easy to use - but still no personal computers then and I had to program main frames using punch cards. My very first personal computer was a Commodore 4K and later a Commodore 2001. My first hard drive cost me $1,700 for that Commodore. My next computer was better; it was an IBM XT. Since then I have had more computers than I can remember and the operating system for most of them has been Linux. I cut my teeth on UNIX. I still prefer DOS to Windows (g).

Hank Roth