Built to do ballistic calculations for the US Army, it was named the Electronic
Numerical Integrator and Computer, and called after its initials the ENIAC”. Today, a pocket calculator or even a USB-C charger has more computing power than the ENIAC or the best computers used to send astronauts to the moon…. But it had to start somewhere and it was completed in Philly at the U of P on December 10, 1945.
ENIAC contained 18,000 vacuum tubes, 7,200 crystal diodes, 1,500 relays, 70,000 resistors, 10,000 capacitors, and approximately 5,000,000 hand-soldered joints. It weighed more than 27 tons, was roughly 8 ft × 3 ft × 100 ft (2 m × 1 m × 30 m) in size, occupied 1,800 sq ft (170 m2) and consumed 150 kW of electricity. This power requirement led to the rumor that whenever the computer was switched on, lights in Philadelphia dimmed. Input was possible from an IBM card reader and an IBM card punch was used for output. These cards could be used to produce printed output offline using an IBM accounting machine, such as the IBM 405. While ENIAC had no system to store memory in its inception, these punch cards could be used for external memory storage. In 1953, a 100-word magnetic-core memory built by the Burroughs Corporation was added to ENIAC. 
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