"The plan began with ENIAC [Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer]. Commissioned by the Army Ordinance Corps at the midpoint of World War II, ENIAC was the world's first electronic general-purpose computer. Built of metal cabinets packed with 17,468 vacuum tubes (descendants of the lightbulb that would, in later decades, be superseded by transistors), it could dash through five-thousand additions a second - at the cost of enough kilowatts to power your modern household for three years."
"ENIAC's thirty-ton bulk can now be replicated by microgram circuits. But its infallible logic gates were proof of concept for artificialintelligence, hailed by 1940s futurists like John von Neumann as a replacement for the human brain - and then as something even more spectacular: the end of time. Time, after all, was simply the lag between past and future. That interval occurred because, in the physical world, it required minutes, hours, millennia for cosmic interactions to play out."
In 1943 the US Army pursued faster prediction through computing, beginning with ENIAC. ENIAC, commissioned by the Army Ordnance Corps, was the first electronic general-purpose computer, composed of metal cabinets and 17,468 vacuum tubes and capable of 5,000 additions per second while consuming enormous power. ENIAC's logic gates established a proof of concept for artificial intelligence, inspiring futurists like John von Neumann to imagine machines replacing human cognition and predicting cosmic and human outcomes instantly. Those computational ambitions encountered a limiting factor in human creativity, exemplified by World War II fighter aces such as Gabby Gabreski.
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