What Happened on October 8th

The US Postal Service issued a special "Computer Technology" stamp to mark the 50th anniversary of the ENIAC. In a ceremony at the Army’s 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 ENIAC’s origins: "Long before PCs became standard office equipment and surfing on the information superhighway became a national obsession, calculations were done the ‘old-fashioned way’ 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."