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was the preparation of firing and bombing tables for the Army which at that time, of course, included the Army Air Corps.

The analyzer installed at Aberdeen had ten integrating units and provisions for two input and two output tables as well. But, despite its value as an important mechanical aid to computation, it had several severe limitations.

It was, of course, known that the Moore School of Electrical Engineering of the University of Pennsylvania had a Bush differential analyzer of somewhat larger capacity than the one installed at Aberdeen. As a matter of fact, the one at the Moore School had fourteen integrating units. Therefore one of the first steps taken was the award to the University of Pennsylvania of a contract by the Ordnance Department for the utilization of this device.

he original agreement between the United States of America and the trustees of the University of Pennsylvania, dated June 5, 1943, called for six months of "research and development of an electronic numerical integrator and computer and delivery of a report thereon." This initial contract committed $61,700 in U.S. Army Ordnance funds

The ENIAC was placed in operation at the Moore School, component by component, beginning with the cycling unit and an accumulator in June 1944. This was followed in rapid succession by the initiating unit and function tables in September 1945 and the divider and square-root unit in October 1945. Final assembly took place during the fall of 1945. By today's standards for electronic computers the ENIAC was a grotesque monster. Its thirty separate units, plus power supply and forced-air cooling, weighed over thirty tons. Its 19,000 vacuum tubes, 1,500 relays, and hundreds of thousands of resistors, capacitors, and inductors consumed almost 200 kilowatts of electrical power. But ENIAC was the prototype from which most other modern computers evolved. It embodied almost all the components and concepts of today's high- speed, electronic digital computers. Its designers conceived what has now become standard circuitry such as the gate (logical "and" element), buffer (logical "or" element) and used a modified Eccles-Jordan flip-flop as a logical, high-speed storage-and-control device.

The ENIAC was not originally designed as an internally programmed computer. The program was set up manually by varying switches and cable connections. However, means for altering the program and repeating its iterative steps were built into the master programmer

The ENIAC led the computer field during the period 1949 through 1952 when it served as the main computation workhorse for the solution of the scientific problems of the Nation. It surpassed all other existing computers put together whenever it came to problems involving a large number of arithmetic operations. It was the major instrument for the computation of all ballistic tables for the U.S. Army and Air Force.

But there are pitfalls. "The biggest caveat is the issue of curation. It's great you opening the gates up to everybody - but all of a sudden you're going to get a lot more stuff."

"We later learned that it was this revolutionary business model. I think the reason it's so pure like that is the reason it's worked so well as a crowdsourcing company."

"I think that the way companies are seeing crowdsourcing is a lot different from the way we see it. They are looking at it as this new business model, as a way to outsource your work to an anonymous crowd of people. We're more about giving people something productive to do with their passions."

it's not so much the software that makes the company, it's the community

"It's an affordable way to be ahead. You're able to see what your customers are thinking and what they're dreaming of, and you're able to measure that against what you're doing."

His concern is that by "mining" the crowd in this way, the wealth that results from the work done remains concentrated in the hands of the people who put out the call - ultimately endangering jobs and the economy. Mr Lanier also believes that crowdsourcing threatens creativity.