Computing · 1945
ENIAC
Eighteen thousand tubes computing a thousand times faster than relays.
Built by J. Presper Eckert and John Mauchly at Penn, ENIAC used about 17,500 vacuum tubes and did 5,000 additions per second. It was the first programmable, general-purpose electronic computer, though reprogramming meant rewiring.
What it built on 3
What it led to 10
Watch
Related measurements
The dashed line marks when it first worked.
Fastest computer in the world Latest: 2.2×10¹⁸ operations per second (2026) Source: Wikipedia: List of fastest computers; Wikipedia: History of supercomputing
Computation per constant dollar, 1850-2006 Latest: 7.3B million units of computer power per 2006 $ (2003) Source: Nordhaus 2007, Two Centuries of Productivity Growth in Computing, J. Econ. Hist. 67(1), Table 6
Fastest supercomputer Latest: 1.81B GFLOP/s (2025) Source: Our World in Data