When the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer, or Eniac, was first built by the University of Pennsylvania for the US Army in 1946, it weighed about 30 tons and had 18,000 vacuum tubes that filled an expansive room. The speed of that first programmable, general-purpose digital computer was about 5,000 hertz, which means it could perform 5,000 additions per second. It cost about $9 million
Crypto Bloomberg Aug 25, 2026