Why Was the First Generation Of Computer So Massive and Useless?

[jamerober]

I’m doing a history of tech project and looking at the first generation of computer (like ENIAC). It’s wild that they took up entire rooms just to do basic math. Does anyone here have old-school stories or facts about why they used vacuum tubes instead of something more reliable? It seems like they spent more time fixing them than actually using them!

 

[Lugwig]

They used vacuum tubes because transistors weren't invented yet. A single tube is about the size of a lightbulb and you needed nearly 20,000 of them to make one machine work. That is why they were huge.

 

[AngelinaFi]

It actually wasn't useless for the time. They were calculating artillery firing tables and working on the hydrogen bomb. It was just extremely specialized compared to the phones we have now.

 

[ArthurMex]

The heat was the biggest problem. All those tubes generated so much thermal energy that the rooms needed massive cooling systems just to keep the components from melting or catching fire.

 

[Ghausmakin]

Actually they weren't useless because they proved that electronic computing was even possible. Before that a computer was literally a human being sitting at a desk doing long division by hand.

 

[Olivier]

They spent half the day just hunting down burnt out tubes. Moths would also get stuck in the relays and short things out which is where the term debugging actually comes from.

 

[captainghost]

Imagine having to manually flip hundreds of switches and plug in cables just to change a program. There was no operating system or software like we think of today.

 

[TaylorTravels]

You have to remember that one ENIAC could do more math in a minute than a human could do in a whole lifetime. It looks slow now but back then it was basically magic.

 

[jameswill8520]

The reliability was a nightmare because the tubes would fail every few hours. You had a team of people constantly running around replacing glass bulbs just to keep the clock cycles going.

 

[rebeccareed]

It was the only technology available at the time that could switch electrical signals fast enough. If they had anything better they would have used it but vacuum tubes were the peak of 1940s tech.

 

[megamind]

Just think about the power bill. These things pulled enough electricity to power a small town just to solve a few differential equations. Most of that energy was wasted as heat.