Short answers, pulled from the story.
ENIAC, the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer, was the first programmable, electronic, general-purpose digital computer. It was completed in 1945 and first put to practical use on the 10th of December 1945. It was formally dedicated at the University of Pennsylvania on the 15th of February 1946.
ENIAC was designed by John Mauchly, a physics professor at Ursinus College, and J. Presper Eckert of the University of Pennsylvania. Construction took place at Penn's Moore School of Electrical Engineering under the code name Project PX, with John Grist Brainerd as principal investigator and Herman Goldstine overseeing the project for the U.S. Army.
ENIAC cost approximately $487,000 to build. The original research contract awarded to the University of Pennsylvania was $61,700; the final cost far exceeded that initial figure. The project was financed by the United States Army Ordnance Corps.
The six primary ENIAC programmers were Betty Holberton (then Betty Snyder), Kay McNulty, Marlyn Wescoff, Ruth Lichterman, Betty Jean Jennings, and Fran Bilas. They were selected from a group of about 200 women employed as human computers at the Moore School of Electrical Engineering. In 1997, all six were inducted into the Women in Technology International Hall of Fame.
ENIAC's first program was a study of the feasibility of a thermonuclear weapon. In December 1945, the machine was used to calculate thermonuclear reactions using equations supplied by researchers working on hydrogen bomb development at Los Alamos National Laboratory.
The ENIAC patent, applied for in 1947 and granted in 1964, was voided by the 1973 federal court ruling in Honeywell, Inc. v. Sperry Rand Corp. The court found that the ENIAC inventors had derived their electronic digital computer concepts from the earlier work of John Atanasoff, who had prototyped the Atanasoff-Berry Computer with Clifford Berry in 1939. The ruling placed the invention of the electronic digital computer in the public domain.