a bit of computer history --
I got an email announcement, today, that it was 51 years ago, on this very day, that ENIAC was shut down at Aberdeen Proving Ground, Md.
According to the Wikipedia entry,
"ENIAC, short for Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer, was the first large-scale, electronic, digital computer capable of being reprogrammed to solve a full range of computing problems, although earlier computers had been built with some of these properties. ENIAC was designed and built to calculate artillery firing tables for the U.S. Army's Ballistics Research Laboratory. The first problems run on the ENIAC however, were related to the design of the hydrogen bomb."
It was built at the Univ. of Penn., and moved from Philly to Aberdeen Proving Grd. in 1947.
"It contained 17,468 vacuum tubes, 7,200 crystal diodes, 1,500 relays, 70,000 resistors, 10,000 capacitors and around 5 million hand-soldered joints. It weighed 30 short tons (27 t), was roughly 8 feet (2.4 m) by 3 feet (0.9 m) by 100 feet (30 m), took up 1800 square feet (167 mē), and consumed 150 kW of power. Input was possible from an IBM card reader, while an IBM card punch was used for output."
(Unfortunately, the Wikipedia entry forgot to mention that ENIAC was powered by a coal-fed steam engine. j/k)