The first computer was the ENIAC.
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In was developed in 1946 at Princeton University. It was big, loud and proud, so to speak.
It cost about $6,000,000
It was about 8 feet high, 3 feet deep, and… 80 feet long
It weighed 30 tons!
It used a lot of power and it was very hot!
And… it was down half the time to replace vacuum tubes gone bad.
The ENIAC weighed about as much as all the students in an average middle school altogether!
The cell phone is the most common computer that most of us carry around. You may not think of it as a computer, but the functionality is enabled by multiple computers working together. The cell phone is something the designers of the ENIAC could never have imagined. Just getting the ENIAC working took everything they had. The designers of the ENIAC were heckled by some of their colleagues saying that ENIAC was a waste of time and would never work. I’m thinking they were wrong…

A cell phone mainboard. It is 1.5” x 2.5”. It has a couple of computers on it.

If compared to the giant ENIAC:

It cost 17,000X less
It is 40,000,000X smaller
It uses 400,000X less power
It is 120,000X lighter
But…
It is 1,300X more powerful.

Is this the latest iPhone or Droid?

NOPE, it is turn-of-the-century, run-of-mill, cell phone with texting, MP3, and 0.3 mega-pixel picture capabilities … and it was used on the Verizon network. “Can you hear me now”
It is not possible, but if this cell phone were made with ENIAC technology.
It would weigh more than all of the middle school students in the state of Florida and would require a small power plant to run it. How would you like that in your pocket?
A crazier comparison is to compare a cell phone to a person. Remember our human computers? If a human did all the computing needed by the cell phone, how would the cell phone compare?
It costs 350x less
it weights 480x less
It uses 280x less power
It weighs 700x less
and…
It is 12,960x faster
Computer chips are making things possible that no one dreamed of before. In the 1950’s, Thomas Watson, Chairman of IBM, thought that the world might only need 5 computers. Today there are billions and billions of computers.

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