The thirty-ton calculator
Before smartphones and laptops, there was ENIAC—the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer. Unveiled to the public on February 14, 1946, it was the first programmable, electronic, general-purpose digital computer. Developed in secret during World War II at the University of Pennsylvania's Moore School of Electrical Engineering, its primary mission was to calculate artillery firing tables for the U.S. Army. A task that took a human computer 12 hours could be done by ENIAC in 30 seconds.
The machine's scale was immense. It weighed 30 tons, occupied a 30-by-50-foot room, and consisted of 40 nine-foot-high cabinets arranged in a U-shape. Its electronics included approximately 18,000 vacuum tubes, 70,000 resistors, 10,000 capacitors, and 6,000 manual switches. Programming the ENIAC did not involve writing code in a language but physically rewiring cables and setting thousands of switches, a process that could take the team of six female programmers days to complete for each new problem. After the war, ENIAC was moved to the Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland, where it ran until October 2, 1955. The Smithsonian has several of the original 40 panels.
The server that started it all
In 1989, British scientist Tim Berners-Lee, then working at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), proposed a new system for information sharing among scientists. By the end of 1990, he had developed the core components: HTML, HTTP, the URL, and the first web browser and server software. This all ran on a single machine: a NeXT Computer.
This computer became the world's first web server, hosting the first website at the address info.cern.ch. To prevent anyone from accidentally turning it off, a handwritten label on the machine's case read: "This machine is a server. DO NOT POWER IT DOWN!". The NeXT computer was an advanced workstation for its time, featuring a 25 MHz processor. On April 30, 1993, CERN made the World Wide Web software available to the public domain, a decision that allowed the web to grow into the global network it is today. The original NeXT server, the birthplace of the World Wide Web, is now in the museum.