ENIAC

ENIAC (/ini.k/ or /ni.k/; Electronic Numerical Integrator And Computer)[1][2][3] was the first
electronic general-purposecomputer. It was Turing-complete, digital, and capable of being
reprogrammed to solve "a large class of numerical problems". [4][5]
ENIAC was initially designed to calculate artillery firing tables for the United States Army's Ballistic
Research Laboratory.[6][7] When ENIAC was announced in 1946 it was heralded in the press as a
"Giant Brain".[8] It had a speed of one thousand times that of electro-mechanical machines. This
computational power, coupled with general-purpose programmability, excited scientists and
industrialists.
ENIAC's design and construction was financed by the United States Army, Ordnance Corps,
Research and Development Command which was led by Major General Gladeon Marcus Barnes.
He was Chief of Research and Engineering, the Chief of the Research and Development Service,
Office of the Chief of Ordnance during World War II. The construction contract was signed on June
5, 1943, and work on the computer began in secret by the University of Pennsylvania's Moore
School of Electrical Engineering[9] starting the following month under the code name "Project PX".
The completed machine was announced to the public the evening of February 14, 1946 [10] and
formally dedicated the next day[11] at the University of Pennsylvania, having cost almost $500,000
(approximately $6,000,000 today). It was formally accepted by the U.S. Army Ordnance Corps in
July 1946. ENIAC was shut down on November 9, 1946 for a refurbishment and a memory upgrade,
and was transferred to Aberdeen Proving Ground, Maryland in 1947. There, on July 29, 1947, it was
turned on and was in continuous operation until 11:45 p.m. on October 2, 1955. [3]
Finished shortly after the end of World War II, one of its first programs was a study of the feasibility
of the hydrogen bomb.[12] A few months after its unveiling, in the summer of 1946, as part of "an
extraordinary effort to jump-start research in the field", [13] the Pentagon invited "the top people in
electronics and mathematics from the United States and Great Britain" [13] to a series of forty-eight
lectures altogether called The Theory and Techniques for Design of Digital Computers more often
named the Moore School Lectures.[13] Half of these lectures were given by the inventors of ENIAC. [14]
ENIAC was conceived and designed by John Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert of the University of
Pennsylvania.[15] The team of design engineers assisting the development included Robert F. Shaw
(function tables), Jeffrey Chuan Chu (divider/square-rooter), Thomas Kite Sharpless (master
programmer), Arthur Burks (multiplier), Harry Huskey (reader/printer) and Jack Davis
(accumulators). ENIAC was named an IEEE Milestone in 1987.[16]

In 2011, to honor of the 65th anniversary of the ENIAC's unveiling, the City of Philadelphia declared
February 15 as The ENIAC Day.[17]

TRANSISTOR
A transistor is a semiconductor device used to amplify and switch electronic signals and electrical
power. It is composed of semiconductormaterial with at least three terminals for connection to an
external circuit. A voltage or current applied to one pair of the transistor's terminals changes the
current through another pair of terminals. Because the controlled (output) power can be higher than
the controlling (input) power, a transistor can amplify a signal. Today, some transistors are packaged
individually, but many more are found embedded in integrated circuits.
The transistor is the fundamental building block of modern electronic devices, and is ubiquitous in
modern electronic systems. Following its development in 1947 by American physicists John
Bardeen, Walter Brattain, and William Shockley, the transistor revolutionized the field of electronics,
and paved the way for smaller and cheaper radios, calculators, and computers, among other things.
The transistor is on the list ofIEEE milestones in electronics, and the inventors were jointly awarded
the 1956 Nobel Prize in Physics for their achievement.

UNIVAC
UNIVAC is the name of a line of electronic digital stored-program computers starting with the
products of the Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation. Later the name was applied to a division of
the Remington Rand company and successor organizations. UNIVAC is
an acronym for UNIVersal Automatic Computer.
The BINAC, built by the Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation, was the first general-purpose
computer for commercial use. The descendants of the later UNIVAC 1107 continue today as
products of the Unisys company.

EDVAC

EDVAC (Electronic Discrete Variable Automatic Computer) was one of the

earliest electronic computers. Unlike its predecessor the ENIAC, it was binary rather than decimal,
and was a stored program computer.

JACK ST. CLAIR KILBY

Jack St. Clair Kilby (November 8, 1923 June 20, 2005) was an American electrical engineer who
took part (along with Robert Noyce) in the realization of the first integrated circuit while working
at Texas Instruments (TI) in 1958. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in physics on December 10,
2000.[1] To congratulate him, US President Bill Clinton wrote, "You can take pride in the knowledge
that your work will help to improve lives for generations to come." [2]
He is also the inventor of the handheld calculator and the thermal printer, for which he has patents.
He also has patents for seven other inventions.