Thomas Haigh: The ENIAC Was Not What You Think

Almost everything you've heard about ENIAC, the first great electronic computer, follows the same script: a crude ancestor of the "real" modern computer, quickly outgrown and left behind. Historian Thomas Haigh thinks that script is wrong — not just incomplete, but shaped by courtroom battles, decades-old memoirs, and historians quietly repeating each other's mistakes. In this episode, Haigh explains how ENIAC was physically rebuilt midway through its working life to run programs in a startlingly modern way, becoming, in his words, "its own grandchild." We dig into why a famous 1944 document long credited with inventing modern programming doesn't say what almost everyone assumes it says, why the very phrase "stored-program computer" may be doing more harm than good, and what happens when a historian actually goes back to the primary documents instead of the familiar anecdotes. This is a conversation about how the history of computing gets written — and how it gets rewritten.