ENIAC’s Legacy, the world’s first general-purpose electronic computer
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Asia Tabb
Aired; May 6th, 2025.
On The Spark, Asia Tabb sat down with Paul Schaeffer—longtime spokesperson for ENIAC, the world’s first general-purpose electronic computer—to explore how a 1940s Army weapons project gave birth to the digital age and why its lessons still matter. ENIAC, unveiled in February 1946 at the University of Pennsylvania’s Moore School of Engineering, was originally built “to solve a problem the Army was having,”
Schaeffer explained: “Every time they made a new artillery piece; they had to have a book that shows you what angle you put the gun barrel at to go to a particular distance.” Before ENIAC, each entry in that firing table took 12 hours on mechanical calculators; with vacuum tubes, ENIAC cut that to 30 seconds, “1,440 times faster.”
While today’s devices—from smartphones to self-driving car sensors—seem a world away, Schaeffer urged us to remember our computing roots:
“It’s good to remember the first computer… but I’d rather people be aware of the things that are going on today.”
He contrasted ENIAC’s pioneering hardware—vacuum-tube switches with no moving parts—with modern digital signal processors, noting that both architectures trace back to the same 1940s insight: “The ENIAC was the first machine to use electrons and not atoms,” he said, explaining the leap from mechanical relays to pure electronic switching. ENIAC’s design also inspired today’s “von Neumann” computers—fetch-decode-execute machines—yet its plug-and-play wiring lives on in single-purpose chips that still “just repeat the same calculation over and over again.”
Schaeffer, now an AI and drone-training innovator, connected those early advances to contemporary privacy and data concerns:
“My cell phone is in my back pocket… it means that in a few days I’ll start getting advertisements for vacuum-tube amplifiers in my feed.… All of our data is being shared and there’s no such thing as privacy.”
Looking ahead, he invites visitors to see four of ENIAC’s original panels at Penn Engineering and to appreciate both its historic achievement—and the pressing ethical debates in today’s digital world.
Listen to the podcast for more information.
