Complex systems often defy direct solution and analysis. One consequence of this is that computers, typically digital computers, have played a key role in advancing our understanding of complex and nonlinear systems. The history of computer technology, especially in the early years, reveals a number of examples where there was a close interplay between the use and development of computers and the study of complex systems. The mathematicians John von Neumann, Stanislaw Ulam, and their colleagues published work in the 1940s and 1950s on their digitial computer studies of nonlinear problems, including deterministic chaos, that used the newly available computers at Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory.ENIAC (Electrical Numerical Integrator And Calculator)
is usually given the honor of being called the first electronic programmable
computer. Its
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construction
was completed in 1946 under the direction of J. Presper Eckert and John
Mauchly at the Moore School of Electrical Engineering of the University
of Pennsylvania. It was built out of about 18,000 vacuum tubes, was physically
quite large, covering something like 2,000 square feet of floor space, and
in operation consumed 200 kilowatts of power. It was programmed by plugging
together its different functional units (adders, multipliers, and accumulators).
Neumann's
study of how to build machines that didn't require hand programming, but
that could select and load-in programs automatically. One of the first of
these was the EDVAC.