... as a demonstration prototype. The first widely known general-purpose electronic computer was the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Calculator (ENIAC) that John W. Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert built at the University of Pennsylvania. The primary motivation for the ENIAC was the need to construct ballistic tables for the U.S. Army. Work began on the ENIAC in 1943 and in 1946 it was completed. It was an enormous machine weighing about 30 tons and filling a 30 by 50 foot room. It contained 1,500 electromechanical relays and over 18,000 vacuum tubes and when it was switched on it consumed 150,000 watts of energy. Despite its enormous size it stored only the equivalent of 80 characters of information. However, it was substantially faster than any previous computer. The idea of storing programs and their data in the same high-speed memory - the stored-program concept - was first put forth by von Neumann in a publication ...

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