The Rise Of Machines That Think

This week's milestones in the history of technology include the end of life of one of the first examples of artificial intelligence or "giant brains" and its 50th anniversary, patents for the transistor, xerography, and carbon paper, and the first solar-powered mobile phone. At 11:45pm, the power to the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer (ENIAC), is removed. For a few years after it started calculating in 1946, it was "the only fully electronic computer working in the U.S." Thomas Haigh, Mark Priestley and Crispin Rope write in ENIAC in Action: Making and Remaking the Modern Computer: Since 1955, When ENIAC punched its last card, its prominence has only grown… ENIAC was as much symbol as machine, producing cultural meanings as well as numbers… In its own small way, ENIAC has returned frequently to the forefront of public awareness over the decades as a symbol of a variety of virtues and vices. Among other things, the ENIAC was a symbol of the computer as a giant brain (see October 8 entry below), giving rise to today's warnings that artificial intelligence "will be able to do everything better than us." Walter H. Brattain and John Bardeen are granted a patent for a three-electrode circuit element utilizing semiconductive materials, otherwise known as the transistor.