Preserving Philly's supercomputer legacy

Technically Philly partnered with Temple's Philadelphia Neighborhoods Program, the capstone class for Temple's Journalism Department to report on the legacy of the Electronic Numerical Integrator And Computer (ENIAC), the world's first general use electronic computer. According to Temple professor and filmmaker LeAnn Erickson, earlier mechanical computers would take 15 minutes to calculate 60-second ballistics trajectories. "With electronics, you have that kind of steadiness that you simply can't get out of a machine," she said. Erickson is the director of "Top Secret Rosies," a documentary that focuses on the female human computers that programmed ENIAC and contributed, largely without recognition, to the technology advancement that ENIAC represented.
Feb. 22, 2011 | Technically Philly