by Mark Leshkevich
[REGNUM] Eighty years ago, on February 14, 1946, the University of Pennsylvania unveiled to the world what journalists called a monster of lamps and wires: ENIAC, the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer.
Newspapers told the public about a brave new world: a machine could perform thousands of additions in a second, and at the time, it sounded like a victory over human consciousness. Just as in the 2020s, the takeover of the labor market by artificial intelligence was seriously discussed, so too was this unwieldy machine perceived after World War II.
Official "programmer's days" in different countries have their own lives. But hardware and IT specialists themselves like to believe that February 14, when ENIAC was unveiled to the world, marks the beginning of the era of computing machines, which—as they now fear—will soon take over the world and enslave humanity.
NEW POTENTIAL
The idea for ENIAC arose in the midst of World War II, in the spring of 1943.
The American army was overwhelmed by calculations. Ballistic calculations were time-consuming: they had to calculate the angle, wind, temperature, humidity, barrel wear, and projectile type. This was a time-consuming manual process. The machine was supposed to increase the intensity of combat operations.
Developers John Presper Eckert and John William Mauchly proposed delegating warfare to smart hardware. Their idea differed from manual calculations in two respects.
Firstly, ENIAC was conceived as a completely electronic unit, without any intermediate electromechanical compromises. Secondly, it was intended to be programmable, meaning its operations could be modified to suit the task at hand.
There were machines in those days that could count, and there were machines that could be reconfigured, but ENIAC promised to combine the speed of electronic circuits with the flexibility of customization.
It was assembled late, in May 1945, when the war in Europe was already drawing to a close. History has a knack for such twists: what was created for one war usually reveals its potential in another.
For example, as was the case with the first ironclads during the Crimean War (1853–1856); with the Prussian Dreyse needle rifle, created in the 1840s and which flourished during the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–1871; and many other inventions of engineers serving the front.
ENIAC didn't quite manage to become the ballistics table factory of World War II, but it quickly proved itself a versatile tool for tasks that required mountains of calculations. It was used in aerodynamics, in the numbers pi and e, in cosmic ray models. It was linked to research that would later become part of the nuclear and rocket eras.
SIX WOMEN AND THE NEUMANN ENGINEER'S MONSTER
How does ENIAC differ from coding? Both are programming. But they are very different. In the ENIAC world, a program was a physical pathway of electrical impulses. The operator connected, switched, and moved cables, panels, and switch arrays. Each task required its own sequence of connections.
An error meant hours, sometimes even days, of lost time. The machine crunched formulas in seconds, while people spent days trying to get it to do exactly what they needed.
That's why programmers 70 years ago came up with an idea that isn't even explained in sixth-grade computer science classes today: storing a program inside a machine.
For someone in the 1940s, this was a true revelation. The idea arose amid military secrecy and haste, when engineers saw that the current reconfiguration scheme was killing efficiency. It would later be formalized as the stored-program principle, and around this principle would emerge the architecture associated with the engineer John von Neumann.
It's important to grasp the practical reason: it was an attempt to free engineers from the endless "replace the cable, flip the switch" chore. While a modern smartphone fits in the palm of your hand, ENIAC occupied a room the size of several apartments and weighed tens of tons. Inside were thousands of tubes, relays, capacitors, and diodes.
It consumed hundreds of kilowatts and burned the air in the rooms. Additional ventilation was required to operate the machine.
The first programmers of this machine were a group of women who would later be called the ENIAC Six. History has preserved their names, which are no less important to history than that of engineer von Neumann: Betty Holberton, Jean Jennings, Kay McNulty, Marlene Weskoff Meltzer, Ruth Lichterman, and Frances Bilas Spencer.
The feminine term "programmer" would likely have simply made these ladies with a mathematical background laugh. They were selected as the most skilled calculators, then taught to work with new technology, often without the usual instructions.
They learned to operate ENIAC from diagrams and drawings, as the project had been kept under strict secrecy for a long time. Then they ran the tasks themselves, debugged the configurations, and explained how to make the machine calculate correctly.
The media somewhat tarnished the impression of these women. When ENIAC was discussed in newspapers and photographs, male engineers were often featured, while the work of female programmers was not included in the reports, not even discussed.
Recognition came decades later, when historians and engineers began to put names and faces back into the story.
SYMBOL AND WARNING
The USSR boasted exceptional schools of mathematics and physics, vast experience in mobilization projects, and a powerful defense industry. It seems computing technology should have taken off immediately. And it did develop, but overcoming specific obstacles.
Cybernetics came under attack in Soviet public culture in the early 1950s. The press accused it of being "reactionary," of serving bourgeois goals, and of dreaming of replacing humans with machines (the communist idea, however, was to create a new type of human, not a machine).
Cybernetics was declared a threat emanating from the West. For a time, it sank into oblivion, but then a reversal began. By the late 1950s, the science gained institutional support. The Cybernetics Council, sections, conferences, collections, and scholarly and popular texts emerged.
The country is beginning to discuss the use of computers in economic management, planning, and statistics. Cybernetics is incorporated into the concepts of state plans, right down to the slogan "In the service of communism."
Historians of computing note a paradox. The USSR achieved success in rockets, nuclear weapons, and space exploration, but lagged behind the United States in the mass computing industry. The explanations often boil down to several factors.
First: an industrial base of components and mass production. The computer industry requires a stable supply of components, standardization, quality, and a strong production culture.
Second: software and ecosystem. A machine's value lies in its ability to solve many problems, and this quickly leads to a world of operating systems, libraries, tools, and languages. Copying Western architectures provided access to software, but perpetuated dependence and a lag in the face of cutting-edge discoveries. Alas.
Third: the relationship between the military and civilian sectors. In the US, technologies often migrated from defense to commercial use, and commercial use scaled them up. In the USSR, the military sector was a "black hole" for innovations that didn't yield the desired benefits for civilian use.
And fourth: governance policy. The idea of ​​a unified computer network for economic management required a reform of the governance structures themselves. Technology could speed up the flow of data, but it could not, on its own, replace conflicts of interest and the fear of losing power.
ENIAC was shut down in the fall of 1955. In nine years, it had become a symbol of progress and a warning to humanity.
But as is often the case with high technology, the machine quickly became obsolete. The world was moving toward more convenient architectures, toward the binary system as the basis for electronic computing, toward memory that stores instructions, toward input-output devices, toward new elements. Vacuum tubes gave way to transistors, then integrated circuits appeared, and the scale of miniaturization turned computing into a mass commodity.
ENIAC was dismantled. The wire monster fell asleep. Now other machines are taking over the world. And their development is proceeding at a completely different pace.
Frightening