Made in Philadelphia, the ‘first modern computer’ is celebrated on 75th anniversary

The women’s groundbreaking role was largely overlooked for decades afterward, their names omitted from events and in the captions of ENIAC photos. Kleiman helped set the record straight in a documentary called The Computers: The Remarkable Story of the ENIAC Programmers, available at eniacprogrammers.org. — ENIACday.org

Imagine life without your laptop, your smartphone, even such ordinary electronic gadgets as your alarm clock.

The ancestor of them all – a room-sized contraption made of switches, cables, and 18,000 glass containers called vacuum tubes – was unveiled to the public 75 years ago this week, in a lab at the University of Pennsylvania.