by James Corbett
corbettreport.com
March 29, 2026

Here’s a headline you likely missed amidst the flurry of world war updates and cannibal-pedophiles-eating-babies stories that have been clogging the newswires of late:

“ENIAC, the First General-Purpose Digital Computer, Turns 80!”

Yes, while the 80th anniversary of the announcement of the advent of the “Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer” (ENIAC) may not be the flashiest or most important story in the world right now, it does provide us with a milestone for evaluating a turning point in human history—the dawn of the Information Age—and the two narratives that have been proffered to explain that turning point.

On one hand, we have the shiny, happy, techno-optimist view of the development of the computer and its impact on society.

On the other hand, we have a dark, dystopian tale of how humanity, enslaved by a techbro oligarchy, is being algorithmically steered into the slaughter pen.

The question of which framing is correct (and whether we can escape these narratives altogether) is not a trivial matter. In fact, it may determine the fate of humanity itself.

Today, let’s take a look at the rise of the computer, what it means, and where the human/computer symbiosis is going from here.

THE HAPPY-CLAPPY, SUNSHINE-AND-LOLLIPOPS STORY OF THE ADVENT OF COMPUTERS!

The sanitized, birthday-party-appropriate history of the ENIAC comes to us primarily from Herman Goldstine, a mathematician who worked on the project to design, construct, test and foist this electronic wonder upon the world. He wrote about his role in the project in his book, The Computer from Pascal to von Neumann, which recounts how the idea for “the first electronic computer” came about; how it was developed, constructed and tested in a mad dash between 1943 and 1945; and how it was announced to the public in February 1946.

Along the way, there is enough computer porn to stir the souls of even the most jaded electro-historians:

In addition to its 18,000 vacuum tubes, the ENIAC contained about 70,000 resistors, 10,000 capacitors, and 6,000 switches. It was about 100 feet long, 10 feet high, and 3 feet deep. In operation it consumed 140 kilowatts of power.

Although these statistics make ENIAC look positively archaic by today’s computing standards, one understands the excitement that the dawn of digital computing stirred in the souls of its original designers.

But what is ENIAC’s legacy? Why should we non-computer geeks care about the transition to digital computing? And how should we feel about this event?

As always, the answer you’ll get to these questions depends upon whom you ask.

If you consult the original February 1946 press release announcing the ENIAC to the world, you get a sense of how its developers felt about its importance.

The speed of this computer is phenomenal. The first problem put on the ENIAC, which would have required 100 man-years of trained [human] computer’s work, was completed in two weeks—of which two hours was actual electronic computing time, and the remaining time devoted to review of the results and details of operation. If used to complete capacity, the ENIAC will carry out in five minutes more than ten million additions or subtractions of ten-figure numbers. The machine performs a simple addition in 1/5000 of a second (and can do a number of distinct additions simultaneously); a single multiplication by a ten-digit multiplier in 1/360 of a second; a nine-digit result in division or square rooting in 1/38 of a second.

And if you ask the technocracy pushers over at IEEE Spectrum, the development of ENIAC marked a turning point in human history:

ENIAC’s significance is both technical and symbolic. Technically, it marks the beginning of the chain of innovations that created today’s computational infrastructure. Symbolically, it made governments, militaries, universities, and industry view computation as a tool for improvement and for innovative applications that had previously been impossible. It marked a tectonic shift in the way humans approach problem-solving, modeling, and scientific reasoning.

Indeed, the astute reader can discern from this single, breathless paragraph the general tenor of the last eight decades of techno-utopianism. It contains the same sense of wonder which brought us the IBM behemoth, the Apple juggernaut, and, eventually the Big Tech Broligarchy. It reflects the pants-wetting excitement behind the evangelists of the “information superhighway” and the dotcom bubble and the AI bubble. It channels the same revolutionary fervour that brought us Apple’s infamous 1984 Macintosh ad.

But have computers really freed us from Big Brother, as Apple’s commercial seems to imply?

Have they delivered on the techno-libertarian dreams of the early computing enthusiasts, or helped “democratize access to information“ as early proponents of the “information superhighway” believed they would?

Will they allow us to transcend the bonds of labour and drudgery to pursue our interests in a world of unimaginable abundance, as Elon Musk and the other pimps of the technocratic dark state promise?

To answer those questions, we’ll have to take a look at the other narrative about the creation of ENIAC—the narrative that this electronic wonder’s cheerleaders would prefer to ignore.

THE DARKER HISTORY OF ENIAC

The interesting part of the ENIAC’s origin story is that, when you start to drill down on the details, you discover some very revealing facts that are usually only mentioned in passing or ignored altogether.

For example, Herman Goldstine, the man who brings us the story of ENIAC’s development, was no mere “mathematician.” He was in fact a lieutenant in the US Army whose job was calculating artillery trajectories for the Army’s Ballistic Research Laboratory.

The ENIAC was funded into existence not through the contributions of University of Pennsylvania alumni or by the endowment of some wealthy benefactor but by the Army’s Ordnance Department.

Observant readers who clicked the above link to the original 1946 announcement of the creation of ENIAC will have noticed that the press release was issued not by the University of Pennsylvania, as one might expect, but by the Department of War.

John Mauchley—the man who, Goldstine informs us, first had the idea of using electronics to perform faster calculations—and J. Prosper Eckart—the engineer Mauchley worked with to flesh out this idea—were not motivated by mere scientific curiosity or by some benevolent idea about freeing humanity. The Moore School of Electrical Engineering at which both researchers were employed was a center for wartime computing.

It was Lieutenant (later Captain) Goldstine, acting as the liaison between the Ballistic Research Laboratory and the Moore School, who recognized the utility of the digital computer for speeding up the computation of firing tables for the US Army’s artillery. And it was on the basis of his recognition of ENIAC’s potential military value that the US Department of War agreed to provide the funds for the computer’s construction.

What’s more, as even Goldstine himself admits, the story that he relates of the computer’s construction is an incomplete one, because key parts of the story are “still classified.” He notes that when a December 1945 meeting of Army Ordnance officers decided to declassify ENIAC and announce the project to the public, an Ordnance Committee memo stipulated: “The design details and circuits […] will remain in the confidential category.”

This is the real story of the creation of ENIAC. It was not some engineering project or an attempt to improve the world. It was—from the perspective of its military backers—a wartime project funded by the military for the purposes of mechanizing warfare and improving the efficiency of their implements of destruction.

The significance of ENIAC’s military background will not be lost on those of us who know the real history of Silicon Valley and understand the intelligence and military roots of the computer industry that ENIAC helped birth.

FROM ENIAC TO THE OCTOPUTER TO PALANTIR

Viewers of my report on “The Secrets of Silicon Valley: What Big Tech Doesn’t Want You to Know“ will recall that, far from a benign toy developed by computer nerds and libertarian dreamers in their free time, the modern computer industry was very much the product of the US government—and, more to the point, the product of the deep state that puppeteers that government.

You will recall, for example, how son-of-a-literal-eugenicist Frederick Terman brought the US Office of Research and Development’s top-secret Radio Research Laboratory’s work out from Harvard to Stanford, where he founded what would become Silicon Valley.

And you’ll remember how Terman’s extensive government background—serving on the Army Signal Corps R&D Advisory Council, on the Air Force Electronic Countermeasures Scientific Advisory Board, on the Naval Research Advisory Committee, on the Defense Science Board, as a Trustee of the Institute of Defense Analysis, and as a consultant to the President’s Science Advisory Committee—and his extensive corporate ties—he was on the board of directors of HP, Watkins-Johnson and Ampex and served as the director and vice chairman of the Stanford Research Institute—meant that Uncle Sam’s military and intelligence apparatus was woven into the fabric of the budding computer industry.

And you’ll know all about Yasha Levine’s research into Surveillance Valley: The Secret Military History of the Internet, detailing how the internet started life not as a tool for the “liberation of humanity” but as the “ARPANET,” a military project designed to insure the continuity of communications during nuclear war, and also to fight the new type of insurgencies and guerrilla warfare campaigns that defined fourth-generation warfare.

As Levine outlines in his book, the military-intelligence nature of the computing industry, usually neglected or downplayed in our current era, was common knowledge to concerned citizens at the time. In fact, so obvious was it that computers and networking technology were weapons of surveillance and control wielded by the government against everyone—citizens and enemies alike—that entire campus protest movements were dedicated to exposing, decrying and resisting this technology.

Students saw Cambridge Project [a US Department of Defense-funded scheme to use MIT’s computers to conduct “social and behavioral science research”], and the bigger ARPANET that plugged into it, as a weapon. A pamphlet handed out at the MIT protest explained: “The whole computer set-up and the ARPA computer network will enable the government, for the first time, to consult relevant survey data rapidly enough to be used in policy decisions. The net result of this will be to make Washington’s international policeman more effective in suppressing popular movements around the world.” […] Another booklet featured a mock advertisement that gave a visual representation to these fears. It featured “The Octoputer,” a computer shaped like an octopus that had tentacles reaching into every sector of society. “The Octoputer’s arms are long and strong,” read the mock ad copy. “It sits in the middle of your university, country and reaches helping hands out in all directions. Suddenly your empire works harder. More of your agents use the computer—solving more problems, finding more facts.”

If we had managed to maintain this sense of the computer industry as a military weapon aimed at populist movements and had retained our wariness of “The Octoputer,” perhaps we would not be in the position we are in now.

Perhaps then we would better understand the rise of the FAANGsters and their deep state backers not as some historical happenstance but as the perfectly predictable culmination of a nearly century-long plan for using computing technology as a weapon for the US military to deploy against its enemies.

Nevertheless, here we are. Given our plight, there is an overwhelming question that now confronts us:

WHAT IS THE PATH FORWARD?

Here we are in 2026, 80 years after the birth of the modern era of computing. And what do we have to show for this “Third Industrial Revolution“?

It would be easy to answer that question with: TikTok brainrot, AI slop and ubiquitous government surveillance of our online activities under the guise of “age verification.”

On the other hand, I could argue that this computing revolution has also brought you The Corbett Report and Media Monarchy and The Last American Vagabond and the tens of thousands of other independent voices that have done more to raise awareness of conspiracy reality in the last 30 years than in the previous 30 centuries of human history.

Technology, it turns out, is a double-edged sword. Perhaps the true nature of this technology—whether as weapon of control or tool of liberation—depends not on the circuits and microprocessors and electronic flashes of information, but on who is wielding that technology and for what purpose.

Even that conclusion is a bit trite, however. There is a very real possibility that we will soon reach a turning point with this technology. If the would-be controllers of humanity are erecting a digital panopticon to keep us cooped up in their digital prison forever, then perhaps we will soon reach a point at which there are only two choices: eschew this technology forever and live completely, 100% computer-free lives, or become a permanent, digital ID-carrying member of the digital ghetto.

Feel free to leave your two cents about this conclusion in the comments section below, fellow computer users! You’ll have to figure this one out yourselves as I’m heading out the door for the first camping trip of the spring with my family!

All I know for sure is I’m not celebrating ENIAC’s 80th birthday and I’ll see all of you here online when I get back…especially those of you who are going to use your computer to leave a comment lecturing others that they shouldn’t be using computers!

Happy computing, everyone!

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