Brian L. Stuart, a computer science professor at Drexel University, gave a talk at Vintage Computer Festival Midwest, posted on the VCF Midwest YouTube channel. This year marks 80 years since the ENIAC was unveiled, and the talk places the machine in the context of the computing work going on around it. Stuart’s argument is that ENIAC may mark the end of an era as much as the start of one.

The talk covers the machine’s physical scale, 30 tons of hardware drawing 150 kilowatts, and walks through the panels and components in a virtual reality environment. It explains how 10-stage ring counter accumulators stored decimal numbers, and how sign-bit discrimination made the first conditional branching possible.

Other sections cover John Mauchly’s early sketches and his interest in weather prediction, what Alan Turing actually meant in his 1936 paper, and a simulation of a universal Turing machine on ENIAC hardware using the vacuum tube accumulators as tape cells.…