The Philadelphia Inquirer from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania • Page 45

2Kb Jnqinrer MONDAY May 14, 1990 DAHY MAGAZINE PEOPLE HOME MOVIES THE ARTS TV STYLE SECTION It I i-" 1 i i VJr ,,,,1111.11111, ni.a, I rV Uyt J5. OsSSS ss JiJNSyy mm i EN I AC was huge. By today's standards, it was slow. But it was first. And it was made at the University of Pennsylvania.

This is the first of five articles about the 250-year-old school's contributions to American life. Phila. TV in Spanish and other languages By Lee Winfrey Inquirer TV Writer Se habla espanol? If your answer to that question is "Yes, I do speak Spanish," you may want to know that television programming in your language is available on five channels in Philadelphia. To a lesser extent, TV programs in Italian, Korean, Greek and others also appear on the little screen here. Later this month, a Ukrainian program will begin, and next month one in Polish.

Delivering Spanish programming here are a broadcast station, WTGI-TV (Channel 61); two national networks, Univision and Galavision, and pay-cable channels Home Box Office (HBO) and Cinemax, which offer part-time service. The predominance of Spanish among foreign-language TV programming is due to the fact that TV is a mass-market medium and therefore targets major audiences first. Nationally, Hispanic-Americans number about 20 million, roughly one-tenth of the U.S. population. Philadelphia's Latino population is estimated at 150,000.

So far, though, foreign-language programming has not been profitable. WTGI and Univision both lost money last year, as did Telemundo, the national network that supplies the Spanish programs seen here on Channel 61. The most widely available foreign-language programming here comes from WTGI, which delivers about half of its schedule in Spanish. Channel 61 can be picked up on a conventional TV dial as a UHF station and is carried by all three cable companies serving the city: Comcast Cablevi-sion of Philadelphia, Greater Media Cable of Philadelphia and Wade Cab-levision. All three cable companies also carry Univision, which broadcasts round-the-clock in Spanish.

Comcast and Greater Media, but not Wade, offer Selecciones in Espanol, which presents some but not all of HBO's and Cinemax's programs in Spanish. Only Comcast carries Galavision, a niMurtrtr oimorl rra narrnulu at 9 U.S. Army ENIAC, the world's first computer, nearly filled a 30-by-S0-foot room; most of its functions could now fit in a wristwatch. THE COLLEGE THAT CREATED THE COMPUTER By Leonard W. Boasberg Inquirer Stall Writer Ideas from Penn was the beginning of "a new epoch in the history of human thought," declared a news story in The pline, from computers to economics and architecture, from research on trichinosis to unlocking the secrets of the clay tablets of Sumeria.

The university's role in developing the computer, though, is to many its most consequential contribution of the modern day. ENIAC was developed in secrecy by a group of brilliant young men working 80- and 90-hour weeks for 2'2 years under a U.S. Army contract that totaled less than $500,000. One of those men, J. Presper Eckert has but a vague recollection of that Feb.

14 unveiling. As chief engineer of the project, he said recently, "I was busy making sure the machine worked and making sure everybody was doing what they were supposed to be doing." But he had no doubt that the machine would work. Before the official unveiling, ENIAC had been secretly tested on problems for the Manhattan Project, which was making the atomic bomb. ENIAC came along a little too late, however, to meet the original purpose for which the Army put up the money. That was to fill the need for firing tables for artillery, bombs, rockets and other projectiles (See ENIAC on 4-E) watch.

Forty-four years after ENIAC made its debut, computers navigate the space shuttle and beat chess masters. They help save lives by diagnosing and finding cures to diseases; they can help end lives by guiding missiles to their targets. They predict the weather; they predict sales for diapers. They replicate Beethoven, Benny Goodman and bop. They buy and sell hundreds of shares of stock per second and record your purchase of a head of lettuce.

They help predict the course of the world economy or allow you to sit home and do your shopping. Police catch thieves with them; thieves rob banks with them. Computers store and make available enormous amounts of information, teach children how to solve problems, and teach other computers how to write computer programs. And today, as the University of Pennsylvania begins week-long celebrations of its founding 250 years ago, it is fitting to remember how people associated with the university have made seminal contributions in virtually every academic disci Mexican-Americans than Univision and Telemundo, both of which seek a mass Latino audience. WTGI, headquartered at 800 Spring Garden moved to Philadelphia last year from Wilmington, where it first went on the air as Channel 61 on July 6, 1986.

It failed first as a standard UHF station and then as a home-shopping station, before converting to a foreign-language format in 1988. Series scheduled for 9 p.m. are often described in TV slang as tent-poles, because they hold up the mid On Feb. 14, 1946, the world's first electronic computer, created at the Moore School of Electrical Engineering at the University of Pennsylvania, was unveiled to the public. It was enormous.

It weighed 30 tons. It nearly filled a 30-by-50-foot room in the Moore School, at 33d and Walnut Streets. It had 40 panels, arranged in the shape of a that extended 80 feet. It contained 18,000 vacuum tubes, 500,000 soldered joints, 70,000 resistors and 10,000 capacitors. They called it ENIAC, an acronym for Electronic Numerical Integrator and Calculator.

It could solve problems a thousand times faster than any other calculating machine in existence. It could do 5,000 problems in a second; in 30 seconds, it could do what would take 20 hours for an ordinary desk calculator. True, it was slow compared with what computers can do today. And it was bulky. Today except for keyboard, display and printer you could put most of its functions in a wrist- Officials of the ENIAC development team (from left): J.

Presper Eckert John Brainerd, Sam Feltman, Herman Goldstine, John W. Mauchly, Harold Pender, G. M. Barnes and Paul N. Gillon.

dle ol the prime-time schedule. WTGI's tentpole is Cine Millonario Million uouar Movie), a selection oi mostly Mexican films airing Mondays through Fridays until 11 p.m. and described by station manager Everett G. Pettiecord as 61's most popular foreign-language series. On all Spanish TV stations, traditional staples are novelas, the Latin American term for soap operas.

WTGI carries several, including (See TELEVISION on 8-E) I to a partial hospitalization 1 VU? '4 wH ffeP program when It's time to return uraisp l-J'm?) WWSiiM PIERCED-EAR REPAIR All is not lost if big, heavy earrings have torn your earlobes. Reconstruction is neither complicated nor time-consuming, Sherrell J. Aston, associate professor of plastic surgery at New York University School of Medicine, says in Health magazine. The fee for one earlobe, usually not covered by insurance, ranges from $300 to $1,000. DIRTY TENNIES If you wear tennis shoes, watch your step.

Researchers report that 82 percent of people admitted to Los Angeles County-University of Southern California Mpdiral Center with serious infections caused by nail punctures of the foot had been wearing tennis shoes when injured. Previous studies have found tennis shoes are a breeding ground for bacteria. Compiled by Marc Schogol from reports from Inquire wire, services. The PNwMptw mqursr ERIC MENCHER THE BUSINESS CYCLE Oil up the old 10-speed. The League of American Wheelmen, a bicyclists' rights group, has designated tomorrow as National Bike-to-Work Day.

Says John Cornelison, the group's executive director: "What we would like to see is not so much people riding bicycles every day but for people to have a choice in the way they get to work. With over 50 percent of trips to work being under 5 miles in length, we feel there is a vast opportunity for increased bicycle transportation." TALKING TRASH Garbage! The mounting mounds of it are more worrisome than food safety, according to a national consumer survey conducted for Better Homes and 3 rrl AOlt V. OUlUtUl lllifcM4Am Marketing Institute. Other findings: Shopper concern about food prices is rising for the first time since 1983, and fat content of food is the No. 1 nutrition worry.

TAKING THE CURE If you've got drug or alcohol problems, take a vacation from them. An increasing number of substance abusers seem to be using vacation time to enter rehabilitation programs, says the head of a California psychiatric hospital. For one thing, says Hal Day, chief executive officer of Capistrano by the Sea, "they can be more discreet about seeking help." Also, "the patient may be able to begin the program on an inpatient basis during their vacation time, and then progress rsvv. nnri- hinro formin On clonnim dny center R'fht, with Amy ftoremhus (foreground) are. (from left) Johnfton.

(from lefty. George Johnson, Elena Chiaretti and Phil Lohmeier. Chiaretti, Joe Madden, Rosemary Serembus and Vic Corona. Olney's Fisher Park: All fixed up On Saturday, she led a cadre of 75 adults and children in a 5 Vi-hour cleanup of the 23-acre Fisher Park at Fifth and Spencer Streets. They plucked trash from the playground, gathered timber from the tennis courts and virtually vacuumed the soccer field and basketball court of garbage and glass.

This was the fourth weekend of the five-week-long Clean-upGreen-up project, which aims to spruce up the city's parks in commemoration of Earth Day. It is sponsored by the Friends of Philadelphia Parks, along (See CLEANUP on 4-E) By Pam Belluck btqumr Sun Writer Get her started talking about the renaissance of Fisher Park in Olney, and Rosemary Serembus will mention modestly that she was nominated for last year's Philadelphia Volunteer of the Year award. She didnt win, and didn't expect to. "Nooooo," she said, chuckling. "They chose somebody with a lot more experience than I have.

But, as they say in the Oscars, I was pleased to be nominated." Serembus, president of the Friends of Fisher Park, merited the recognition. INDEX Ann Landers 2 The Arts 3 6 Erma Bom beck 2-E Going-out guide 3-E Radio talk 6-E Soap operas 2-E Television 6-E On theater 3-E Music reviews 3-E. 4-E. 8-.