Computer Industry

     The computer industry was born with construction of the ENIAC in 1946.
     Even so, the term goes back farther than 1946. It was coined during World War II to describe
workers, mostly women, who used cumbersome mechanical calculators to determine the
trajectories of artillery shells. Since their jobs were to
"compute" the shell trajectories, they came to be
called "computers."
     When the first machine that could perform such
calculations came along, ENIAC, it naturally was
called a computer as well.
     Built at the University of Pennsylvania's Moore
School of Electrical Engineering, ENIAC stood for
"Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer," but
its birth lay in World War II as a classified military
project known as Project PX.
     The ENIAC laid the foundations for the modern electronic computing industry. More than
any other machine, the ENIAC demonstrated that high-speed digital computing was possible
using the then-available vacuum tube technology.
     Microcomputers, what virtually everyone has on their desks in the late 1990s, were born a
short time later through the invention of the transistor at Bell Laboratories in 1947.
     The first transistorized computer is completed in 1956. It's called the TX-O (Transistorized
Experimental computer), and is built at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.