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Completed in 1945, ENIAC used thousands of vacuum tubes to calculate artillery firing tables. The figure is taken from Computer History Museum, which is linked in full on this page. Every fact on Mondo Knows names its source rather than repeating an unsourced claim.

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ENIAC was the first general-purpose electronic computer

Completed in 1945, ENIAC used thousands of vacuum tubes to calculate artillery firing tables

Built at the University of Pennsylvania, ENIAC contained nearly 18,000 vacuum tubes and consumed over 150 kilowatts of electric power. It was designed to calculate artillery firing trajectories for the United States Army. Programmers had to manually reconfigure cables and switches to set up different calculations.

Glen Beck and Betty Snyder program the ENIAC in building 328 at the Ballistic Research Laboratory — Unknown author Unknown author · Public domain · source

Where this comes from

Computer History Museum

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Tags: eniac, computing, vacuum-tubes

ENIAC was the first general-purpose electronic computer: the short answers

Where does this come from, and can I check it?: Completed in 1945, ENIAC used thousands of vacuum tubes to calculate artillery firing tables. The figure is taken from Computer History Museum, which is linked in full on this page. Every fact on Mondo Knows names its source rather than repeating an unsourced claim.
Is this really a technology fact?: Yes. It sits on the Technology shelf, one of 1,090 sourced facts grouped into space, animals, the human body, history, science and more. Category pages collect every fact in the same field.
What else can I read about it?: The links under the fact point to a quiz, game, puzzle or calculator on the same subject, and the shelf below shows related facts. The wording here is original, and quoted phrases are marked as quotations.