On this day in 1955 the world’s first fully electronic, general-purpose computer, ENIAC was retired from service. Unveiled by designers John Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert in February 1946, the ENIAC was originally designed to calculate artillery firing tables for the United States Army. The ENIAC could run 5,000 operations per second, a speed that was a thousand times faster than that of electro-mechanical machines. It ran for eleven years before it was officially retired.
