Remembering ENIAC

Explores ENIAC’s cultural career and influence within different spheres from 1945 onward. Scholarly and popular contexts include contemporary newspaper reports and technical publications, its place in early computing texts, the long-running patent cases of the 1960s and 1970s, ENIAC’s place as a relic in key computer exhibitions, its anniversary celebrations in the mid-1990s, and the recent focus on its initial cohort of female operators. Influenced by the ideas of memory studies, this chapter documents the various and sometimes contradictory uses to which ENIAC has been put by different computing communities engaged in the construction of “useful pasts.”