Hello list,
That looks like a nice exhibit, but I must admit that the video leaves me wondering just what insight it gives into programming ENIAC, as opposed to operating it. It looks like the demonstrator is setting up operations on the exhibit one at a time, and then executing them by hand. Actual ENIAC usage, of course, involved setting up a whole series of instructions at once (including loops, conditional branches etc) and then letting them execute automatically.
ENIAC "programmers" - more properly, perhaps, the machine's developers, the scientists who used it, and the operators who helped them - used a variety of graphical notations to plan these set-ups. An simple example is at
http://markpriestley.net/akg.pdf - this diagram shows exactly how to set the switches and plug the wires to calculate n, n^2 and n^3, stopping before an overflow happens. Even with a simulator, this is quite hard to follow ...
The same goes for other reconstructions, in my experience. For example, watching the Colossus rebuild working at Bletchley Park is a wonderful experience, but gives little insight into many aspects of what the machine was doing, or what it was capable of. Does anyone know of museum exhibits that successfully convey something about programming, or it is just too abstract an activity?