EDVAC was one of the earliest electronic computers. Unlike its predecessor the ENIAC, it was binary rather than decimal, and was designed to be a stored-program computer. ENIAC inventors John Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert proposed the EDVAC's construction in August 1944. A contract to build the new computer was signed in April 1946 with an initial budget of US$100,000. EDVAC was delivered to the Ballistic Research Laboratory in 1949. The Ballistic Research Laboratory became a part of the US Army Research Laboratory in 1952. Functionally, EDVAC was a binary serial computer with automatic addition, subtraction, multiplication, programmed division and automatic checking with an ultrasonic serial memory capacity of 1,000 34-bit words. EDVAC's average addition time was 864 microseconds and its average multiplication time was 2,900 microseconds.
Project and plan
ENIAC inventors John Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert proposed EDVAC's construction in August 1944, and design work for EDVAC commenced before ENIAC was fully operational. The design would implement a number of important architectural and logical improvements conceived during the ENIAC's construction and would incorporate a high-speed serial-access memory. Like the ENIAC, the EDVAC was built for the U.S. Army's Ballistics Research Laboratory at the Aberdeen Proving Ground by the University of Pennsylvania's Moore School of Electrical Engineering. Eckert and Mauchly and the other ENIAC designers were joined by John von Neumann in a consulting role; von Neumann summarized and discussed logical design developments in the 1945 First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC. A contract to build the new computer was signed in April 1946 with an initial budget of US$100,000. The contract named the device the Electronic Discrete Variable Automatic Calculator. The final cost of EDVAC, however, was similar to the ENIAC's, at just under $500,000.
Technical description
The EDVAC was a binary serial computer with automatic addition, subtraction, multiplication, programmed division and automatic checking with an ultrasonic serial memory capacity of 1,000 44-bit words. Physically, the computer comprised the following components:
EDVAC's average addition time was 864 microseconds and its average multiplication time was 2,900 microseconds. Time for an operation depended on memory access time, which varied depending on the memory address and the current point in the serial memory's recirculation cycle. The computer had almost 6,000 vacuum tubes and 12,000 diodes, and consumed 56 kW of power. It covered 490 ft² of floor space and weighed. The full complement of operating personnel was thirty people per eight-hour shift.
John Von Neumann's famous EDVAC monograph, First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC, proposed the main enhancement to its design that embodied the principal "stored-program" concept that we now call the Von Neumann architecture. This was the storing of the program in the same memory as the data. The British computers EDSAC at Cambridge and the Manchester Baby were the first working computers that followed this design. And it has been followed by the great majority of all computers ever made since. Having the program and data in different memories is now called the Harvard architecture to distinguish it.
Installation and operation
EDVAC was delivered to the Ballistics Research Laboratory in 1949. After a number of problems had been discovered and solved, the computer began operation in 1951 although only on a limited basis. In 1952 it was running over hours a day. By 1957 EDVAC was running over 20 hours a day with error-free run time averaging 8 hours. EDVAC received a number of upgrades including punch-card I/O in 1954, extra memory in slower magnetic drum form in 1955, and a floating-point arithmetic unit in 1958. EDVAC ran until 1962 when it was replaced by BRLESC.
