Seventy-nine years ago today, on February 14, 1946 (January 13, 1946), the world's first electronic computer was born. ENIAC at work On February 14, 1946, the world's first computer, ENIAC, was born at the University of Pennsylvania in the United States. During World War II, the U.S. military asked Dr. Mauchly and his student Eckert of the University of Pennsylvania to design an "electronic" computer - ENIAC (ElectronicNumericalIntegratorandCalculator), an electronic digital integrator and calculator) that replaced relays with vacuum tubes, with the purpose of calculating the trajectory of artillery shells. The machine used 18,800 vacuum tubes, 50 feet long and 30 feet wide, covering an area of 1,500 square feet and weighing 30 tons (about the size of a classroom and a half and the weight of six elephants). Its computing speed is fast, it can perform 5,000 addition operations per second, and it has been in operation for nine years. Due to the fierce consumption of electricity, it is said that every time ENIAC is turned on, the lights in West Philadelphia are eclipsed. In addition, the loss rate of vacuum tubes is quite high, and it is possible to burn a vacuum tube almost every 15 minutes. It takes the operator more than 15 minutes to find the broken tube, which is extremely inconvenient to use. Someone once joked: "As long as the machine can run continuously for five days and not a single vacuum tube burns, the inventor will be celebrated. It has been 70 years since the birth of the first computer. During this period, computers have developed at an amazing speed. First, transistors replaced tubes, and then the development of microelectronics technology made the components on computer processors and memories smaller and larger. The computing speed and storage capacity of computers increased rapidly. Intel Corporation of the United States announced the development of the world's fastest supercomputer, which can perform 328 billion addition operations per second (66 million times that of the first electronic computer). If a person completes the amount of calculations it performs in one second, it will take a person to calculate around the clock for more than 10,000 years. The "Eniac" of that year was not as good as some advanced pocket calculators compared with today's computers, but its birth opened up a new information age for human beings and made great changes in human society. On February 14, 1996, on the 50th anniversary of the advent of the world's first electronic computer, US Vice President Al Gore restarted the computer to commemorate the arrival of the information age. The two inventors, Mo Qilai and Eckert ENIAC, used the tube Eniac (ENIAC)