Eniac, the First General-Purpose Digital Computer, Turns 80

ENIAC, the first large-scale general-purpose programmable electronic digital computer, celebrated its 80th anniversary on 15 February 2026. Developed at the University of Pennsylvania's Moore School during WWII to compute artillery firing tables, its purely electronic design and programmability were breakthroughs that laid the foundation for the modern computing industry. The article traces eight decades of computing milestones from ENIAC's 1946 debut through mainframes, microprocessors, the Internet, cloud computing, and generative AI.