The ENIAC (electronic numerical integrator and computer) secretly went under development during WWII at the University of Pennsylvania. The goal of the ENIAC was to quickly generate ballistic missile firing tables for use by the Allied Forces in foreign geographical locales such as Northern Africa.

The ENIAC was sickeningly large, weighing more than 30 tons and containing 19,000 vacuum tubes. Though the ENIAC wasn't completed in time to serve its intended use, the ENIAC was built to be a multifunction computational workhorse, not a machine with a single purpose. From 1949 to 1952, the ENIAC served as the main computational device for the nation's scientific problems.