National Geographic SocietyIn partnership with

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Events

1946 – ENIAC, the first general-purpose electronic computer, unveiled at the University of Pennsylvania.

Births

1564 – Galileo Galilei, Italian astronomer and physicist

1809 – André Dumont, Belgian geologist

1861 – Charles Edouard Guillaume, French physicist and Nobel Prize laureate

1873 – Hans von Euler-Chelpin, German-born chemist and Nobel Prize laureate

Deaths

1988 – Richard Feynman, American physicist and Nobel Prize laureate

1999 – Henry Way Kendall, American physicist and Nobel Prize laureate

Comments

#1 Randy Bancroft
February 15, 2008

In the future I hope you are as diligent to make note of the actual first electronic digital (binary) computer developed in 1939 at Iowa State University, as you are at perpetuating the notion that Eniac was the first by the inclusion of the modifier “general-purpose” and the exclusion that it was a decimal computer. The plans for general purpose use (and numerical integration) existed for the ABC computer, but WWII interfered with the implementation.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atanasoff%E2%80%93Berry_Computer

http://www.cs.iastate.edu/jva/jva-archive.shtml

Thank you,

Best,

Randy