The ENIAC (Electrical Numerical Integrator And Calculator) was the first computer developed in the United States. John Presper Eckert and John Mauchly of the Moore School of Electrical Engineering at the University of Pennsylvania created the Eniac Computer. John Mauchly was the chief consultant and John Presper Eckert was the chief engineer. John Presper Eckert received his bachelor's degree in electrical engineering in 1941 and his master's degree in 1943, which qualified him as the project's chief engineer. John Mauchly received his bachelor's, master's, and doctorate degrees in physics from Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland. John Eckert met John Mauchly when he was a graduate student. It took Mauchly and Eckert a year to design and 18 months to build the Eniac. The Eniac could hardly be considered "just a computer" due to its enormous size and speed. An Eniac programmer described the machine as "faster than previously thought." This statement is invalid since the Eniac is capable of calculating 5000 addition, 357 multiplication or 38 division problems in one second. It could perform the functions a man would spend 20 hours on in about 15 minutes. This was a thousand times faster than any other calculating machine to date. The use of vacuum tubes instead of switches and relays created the speed increase. These vacuum tubes made the machine difficult to reprogram. Programming changes took the technician weeks, and the machine always required long hours of maintenance. However this was not a total failure because it led to many improvements in the vacuum tube. All this speed and the large number of components that make up the Eniac did not come at a cheap price. The total price of the f......middle of paper......c and Discrete Variable Automatic Computer), both faster than the Eniac, began to share the workload of the Computer Science Laboratory with the ENIAC in 1953. It became apparent almost immediately that the Eniac would have to be modified if it was to remain competitive, economical and efficient. Even with these transformations and the fact that trouble-free operation time remained at around 100 hours per week during Eniac's last 6 years of operation, its operating costs were much more expensive than those of EDVAC and ORDVAC. Eniac was no longer economically competitive. The workload gradually shifted to the other machines and at 11.45pm on 2 October 1955 the power supply to Eniac was interrupted. Even though its purpose was now exhausted, Eniac still played an important role in the development of the computer industry. “His death was natural, it served its purpose.”