Today in 1955, at 11:45pm, the power to the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer (ENIAC), was removed.
For a few years after it started calculating in 1946, the ENIAC was “the only fully electronic computer working in the U.S.” Thomas Haigh, Mark Priestley and Crispin Rope write in ENIAC in Action: Making and Remaking the Modern Computer:
Since 1955, when ENIAC punched its last card, its prominence has only grown… ENIAC was as much symbol as machine, producing cultural meanings as well as numbers… In its own small way, ENIAC has returned frequently to the forefront of public awareness over the decades as a symbol of a variety of virtues and vices.
Among other things, the ENIAC was a symbol of the computer as a giant brain (as you will see in the upcoming October 8 TDID), giving rise to Alon Musk’s warnings in 2017 that artificial intelligence “will be able to do everything better than us” and today’s widespread fears that it may even decide to get rid of us altogether. Or as Marvin Minsky speculated in 1970, it may decide to keep us as pets.