To give you some idea of how rapidly computer hardware technology has advanced, let's compare the first digital processor with one of today's models.
The ENIAC (which stood for Electronic Numerical Integrator and Calculator) was developed in 1946 at the University of Pennsylvania. ENIAC occupied more than 640 square feet of floor space and weighed nearly 30 tons. Instead of the integrated circuits used in today's computers, ENIAC's digital technology was based on over 17,000 vacuum tubes. At a speed of 100,000 pulses per second, ENIAC ran more than 500 times faster than other computing machines of that day and age. Its main application was for computing ballistic trajectories for the U.S. Army. It could perform around 300 multiplications in a second. To program the ENIAC, you would have to manipulate hundreds of cables and switches. It took two or three days for a team of several programmers, most of whom were young women, to set up a single program that would then run for a few seconds.
The Pentium III processor is Intel's most advanced and powerful processor for desktop computers. The chip contains 9.5 million transistors and runs at speeds up to 500 MHz (500 million cycles per second). The Pentium processor is small enough to fit completely within the confines of the fingernail on your pinky finger. It executes millions of instructions per second. It supports a huge range of multimedia applications, including three-dimensional graphics, streaming audio and video, and speech recognition applications. To program the Pentium, you can choose from a wide range of high-level programming languages, including the Java language.