ENIAC, the General-Purpose Digital Computer, Is 80

ENIAC, the first large-scale general-purpose programmable electronic digital computer, celebrates its 80th anniversary. Publicly demonstrated on 15 February 1946 at the University of Pennsylvania, ENIAC used ~18,000 vacuum tubes, filled a 9x15m room, and required manual cable reconfiguration to reprogram. Built by John Mauchly, J. Presper Eckert, and Adele Katz Goldstine for the U.S. Army to compute artillery firing tables, it was decommissioned in 1955. The piece covers ENIAC's technical legacy, the pivotal role of the six women who first programmed it (the ENIAC 6), a 1973 court ruling crediting John Atanasoff as the true inventor of the electronic digital computer, an 80-student replica built in 2025, and broader lessons from 80 years of computing evolution including predictions for future hardware specialization and energy efficiency.