ENIAC Day Date in the current year: February 15, 2024

In 1943, J. Presper Eckert and John Mauchly of the University of Pennsylvania began working on the computer at the Moore School of Electrical Engineering. It was a secret project financed by the U. S. Army and designed to calculate artillery firing tables. The work was complete in 1945.

ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer) was formally dedicated at the University of Pennsylvania on February 15, 1946. The press nicknamed it a “Giant Brain”. As the war was already over and the U. S. Army didn’t need a computer to calculate artillery firing tables anymore, it was decided to use ENIAC to research the feasibility of the thermonuclear weapon.

ENIAC’s initial six programmers, then called “operators”, were all women. Sadly, their work was not widely recognized for more than five decades. Most of the female programmers didn’t receive recognition for their work in their lifetimes. They weren’t even invited to the 50th anniversary of the invention of ENIAC.

ENIAC Day was officially inaugurated by the City of Philadelphia in 2011 to celebrate the 65th anniversary of ENIAC’s unveiling. It is celebrated across the world on February 15.