It is the first large-scale general-purpose electronic computer. It was built at the University of Pennsylvania's Moore School of Electrical Engineering in a military project by John Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert. The first tasks were such as calculating ballistic firing tables and designing atomic weapons.
The ENIAC laid the foundations for the modern electronic computing industry using vacuum tube technology. Roughly 2000 of the computer's vacuum tubes were replaced each month by a team of six technicians.
ENIAC could discriminate the sign of a number, compare quantities for equality, add, subtract, multiply, divide, and extract square roots. The multiplication process for two 10-digit numbers took 2.6 milliseconds (ca. 5,000 operations per second).
Since ENIAC was initially not a stored program machine, it had to be reprogrammed for each task. The program was set up manually by varying switches and cable connections.