The ENIAC was the first electronic general-purpose computer, it belongs to the Smithsonian a museum in Washington, D.C. It was created in 1946 by John Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert to calculate artillery firing tables for the United States Army. Its memory was very primitive and could not make logical decisions based on its calculations. Back then it cost about $500,000 and today it is worth about $6 million. It weighed 30 tons and used 160 kilowatts of electrical power causing it to heat up becoming very hot. It was enormous about 8 feet high, 3 feet deep and 80 feet long big enough to fit a school bus inside. The ENIAC contains 17,468 delicate vacuum tubes, 72,000 crystal diodes, 1500 relays, 70,000 resistors, 10,000 capacitors and about 5,000,000 hand-soldered joints. It is down half the time to replace damaged vacuum tubes. The longest it went without shutting down was 116 hours and could hold up to 20 10-digit numbers. This device had no system to store memory, so it used punch cards as external memory storage. It held 80 bytes per card and it was 2400 times faster than an average human being. The basic machine cycle was 200 microseconds or 5,000 cycles per second for operations on the 10-digit numbers. In one of these cycles the ENIAC could write a number to a register, read a number from a register, or add/subtract two numbers.
The cell phone is an electronic telecommunication device created in 1973 by Martin Cooper. It is small enough to fit in a pocket unlike the ENIAC. If you were to compare the Samsung SCH-A850 to the ENIAC the cell phone costs 17,000 times less, is 40,000,000 times smaller, uses 400,000 times less power, 120,000 times lighter and 1300 times more powerful. The Samsung SCH-A850 came out 11 years ago imagine how much more efficient the iPhone 7 is. A cell phone is mainly made up of plastics, metals, a circuit board, rechargeable batteries, speakers and microphones. It has many functions unlike the ENIAC like calling, texting, video chatting, games, time, camera and much more. A cell phone now can have a memory of anywhere from 8GB to 128GB. A phone is 12,960 times faster than an average human and can go days without recharging its battery. For an example an iPhone 4 has the stand by time of 300 hours. It takes about 1000 to 2000 watt hours to charge your phone for an entire year, which is significantly less than the amount of power the ENIAC uses. An iPhone 6 can process instructions at a rate of approximately 1.2 instructions every cycle in each of its 2 cores. That’s 3.36 billion instructions per second, which is truly incredible to see how far we have come since the first computer.
