Blasts from the Past: A look at stories from the pages of National Defense as NDIA and the magazine approach their 100th anniversary.

• Position: UP FRONT

After some three years of being veiled in secrecy during World War II, Army Ordnance Magazine, the predecessor to National Defense, unveils ENIAC, the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer.

With its 18,000 vacuum tubes, the machine promised to "free scientific thought from the drudgery of lengthy calculating work." It took up a 30-by-50-foot room, weighed 30 tons and could do 10 million additions and subtractions of 10 figure numbers in about five minutes as long as most of those tubes hadn't burned out.

While the article correctly stated that ENIAC was conceived and eventually used to calculate artillery firing tables, it omitted its first--and at the time still classified purpose--solving mathematical problems necessary to build the first atom bombs.

Col. Paul N. Gillon of the office of the chief...