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EDVAC ○̉｜Definition｜1st｜20260427131036-00-⌔
EDVAC
EDVAC (Electronic Discrete Variable Automatic Computer) was one of the earliest electronic computers. It was built by Moore School of Electrical Engineering at the University of Pennsylvania in the United States.12 Along with ORDVAC, it was a successor to the ENIAC. Unlike ENIAC, it was binary rather than decimal, and was designed to be a stored-program computer.
ENIAC inventors, John Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert, proposed the EDVAC’s construction in August 1945. A contract to build the new computer was signed in April 1946 with an initial budget of US$ 100,000. EDVAC was delivered to the Ballistic Research Laboratory in 1949. The Ballistic Research Laboratory became a part of the US Army Research Laboratory in 1952.
Functionally, EDVAC was a binary serial computer with automatic addition, subtraction, multiplication, programmed division and automatic checking with an ultrasonic serial memory3 having a capacity of 1,024 44-bit words. EDVAC’s average addition time was 864 microseconds and its average multiplication time was 2,900 microseconds.
Printed 2026-06-28.
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Link to original Footnotes
“The History of Computing at BRL”. chimera.roma1.infn.it. Retrieved December 3, 2021. ↩
Encyclopedia of computer science. Edwin D. Reilly, Anthony Ralston, David Hemmendinger (4th ed.). Chichester, Eng.: Wiley. 2003. ISBN 978-1-84972-160-8. OCLC 436846454. ↩
Wilkes, M. V. (1956). Automatic Digital Computers. New York: John Wiley & Sons. pp. 305 pages. QA76.W5 1956. ↩
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