What was the next stage of the technical revolution that Babbage started?
The image above is from http://ei.cs.vt.edu/~history/ENIAC_1.gif. Contributed by Christopher LaMonte with John LIlly.
The picture above is the ENIAC. The ENIAC was the next big step of the technical revolution. ENIAC stands for the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer. ENIAC followed several decades of failed attempts to improve on Babbage's dreams. The Moore School of Electrical Engineering at the University of Pennsylvania created the first electronic computer on Valentine's Day 1946. (Farrington 74) The original purpose for the creation of ENIAC was to calculate trajectory of projectiles and bombs during World War II. ENIAC was very large to say the least. "It weighed 30 tons and occupied 1,800 square feet of space. It had more than 19,000 vacuum tubes, 70,000 resistors, 10,000 capacitors, and 6,000 toggle switches" (Farington 74). The maximum capacity of ENIAC was 5,000 calculations per second. The practicality of ENIAC was almost non-existent. The development of the integrated circuit allowed the 30 tons to be reduced to almost nothing. ENIAC paved the way for the dumb terminals of the late 1950's. "A dumb terminal was a display machine that lacked processing ability. It could, in some cases, be used to enter and print data, while the host computer did nearly everything else" (Hamblen 40). The technical revolution was vastly occupying many area of the United States. By 1981, there were over one million dumb terminals up and running. Sales of the dumb terminals kept rising until 1984 when the release of the personal computer shoved its way to the forefront of the technical revolution.
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