ENIAC construction begins and Intel unveils the i486 (PCGH-Retro, April 10)

…1943: ENIAC, the electronic number integrator and calculator, sounds a bit more elegant in English than Eelectronic Nnumerical Iintegrator and Computer, is considered the first generally usable electronic computer. Its construction begins on April 10, 1943 during the Second World War. Its purpose is military: With the then fantastic speed of 5,000 additions per second, the approximately 90 square meter computer completed in 1946 after the end of the war is about 1,000 times faster when calculating fire control solutions for artillery.

…1989: No ‘Core’, no ‘Pentium’ – the new processor that Intel is presenting this April 10 at the Comdex in Chicago has no name, just a number: 486more accurate: i486DX. It follows the i386 and is technically far superior to it; 8 KiByte SRAM as an L1 cache directly in the chip, an integrated floating point unit (FPU) and other improvements (including the structure based on the pipeline principle) ensure that the per-MHz performance is doubled compared to the predecessor. Intel’s new 32-bit processor consists of 1.2 million transistors and runs on a core voltage of 5 volts, so it initially reaches 25 MHz and later even up to 100 MHz. Despite the initially very high prices of around 900 US dollars, the i486 became a success, and competitors such as Cyrix or AMD soon began to copy the processor. Nevertheless: There will not be a 586 – the successor will be given a real name for the first time: Pentium – because, unlike number combinations, it can be protected under trademark law in the USA.

…1995: The Internet browser Opera officially sees the light of day. Version 1.0 of the Norwegian browser will be officially shown for the first time at the WWW conference taking place from 10th to 14th April.