While walking home one day, I took a small detour to check out an interesting-looking Geocache. When I arrived at the coordinates, I found a historical marker:
BINAC -- possibly the world's first true computer -- was built here! (Click for larger.)
BINAC, the world’s first “commercial, electronic, stored-program, digital computer” was built and tested here in North Philadelphia. (Its inventors, Presper Eckert and John Mauchly, were also the creators of ENIAC, at the nearby University of Pennsylvania.)
That’s a lot of qualifiers for a historical marker, but nearly everything that would even remotely be called a “computer” these days is an “electronic, digital, stored-program computer.” The vast majority of them also happen to be commercial. In a real sense, BINAC was one of the first “real” computers — and probably the first one that really started to resemble the core architecture of modern computers.
