What Happened on October 8th
October 8, 1996
Special US Stamp Commemorates ENIAC
The US Postal Service issued a special "Computer Technology" stamp to mark the 50th anniversary of the ENIAC. In a ceremony at the Armyโs Aberdeen Proving Ground, speakers paid tribute to computer pioneers with the image of a brain partially covered by small blocks that contain parts of circuit boards and binary language. The stamp was designed entirely on a computer.
A Postal Service news release from October 8 introduced the stamp with a discussion of the ENIACโs origins: "Long before PCs became standard office equipment and surfing on the information superhighway became a national obsession, calculations were done the โold-fashioned wayโ by hand. And, as is often the case, it took a war to bring the world into the computer age specifically, the need for the United States Army to rapidly compute ballistic firing tables."