Eckert, J. Presper, Jr. 1919–1995 Mauchly, John W. 1907–1980

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Computer Designers

The Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer (ENIAC) fired up its 18,000 vacuum tubes in a large room at the Moore School of Electrical Engineering at the University of Pennsylvania just after the end of World War II. Its youthful designers, (John) Presper Eckert and John Mauchly, looked on with a mixture of pride and anticipation.

Eckert was the chief engineer of the ENIAC. He developed the idea of a reduced electrical load to increase the reliability of the fragile tubes in themachine. Mauchly, effectively the chief scientist, left the hardware problems to Eckert and kept the more fluid software and logic development for himself. Mauchly convinced his younger colleague of the general utility of a perfected model of the machine that they had built for the U.S. Army to calculate tables for firing artillery more accurately and quickly.

J. Presper Eckert Jr. and John W. Mauchly combined their engineering and scientific talents to produce the ENIAC, which first saw action in U.S. Army ballistics tests in 1947.

Frustrated by the limitations of that machine, these "Wright Brothers of computing" left the university in a patent dispute, and formed what quickly became the Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation. Mauchly convinced organizations as diverse as the U.S. Bureau of the Census, Northrop Aircraft, A.C. Neilson, Prudential, and the newly independent U.S. Air Force, to buy a UNIVAC (Universal Automatic Computer), as Eckert and Mauchly called their universal calculator.

Eckert was essentially a prototypical boy genius engineer. He joined the ENIAC project right out of college. He earned both his bachelor's degree (1941) and master's degree (1943) from the Moore School, and started as chief engineer for ENIAC on his twenty-fourth birthday. He stayed closeto electrical engineering his entire career. He was an expert on vacuum tubes and mercury delay line memories early in his career. After the ENIAC, he was the chief engineer of the Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation. When Remington Rand bought the company, Eckert stayed on as director of engineering. Remington Rand merged with Sperry to form Sperry-Rand in 1955. Eckert became a vice president and retained that rank until they ironically retired him and the UNIVAC brand name the same year, 1982.

Mauchly was a physicist. He taught for most of the 1930s at Ursinis College near Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He was interested in modeling the weather and built some crude digital circuits that would have to be part of a machine to do that. He went to a summer program in 1941, sponsored by the Moore School, to learn more about electronic systems. Mauchly hit it off with the staff and was asked to join the school's faculty. This he did. When the U.S. Army developed bottlenecks getting out its firing tables, he suggested an electronic solution. The army funded his suggestion, and he teamed with Eckert to develop the ENIAC.

During the construction of the ENIAC, mathematician John von Neumann (1903–1957) was brought in to advise the project by Herman H. Goldstine, the army liaison. He facilitated some discussions by Eckert, Mauchly, and other young engineers and scientists who realized ENIAC's shortcomings before it was finished. Von Neumann, in the "Draft Report on the EDVAC," which described a new stored program machine, summarized their discussions. Even though it was only a draft summarizing his own and other people's work, nearly everyone erroneously gave von Neumann complete credit for the insights that led to stored program computers. Von Neumann did nothing to dissuade such beliefs, an omission that embittered both Eckert and Mauchly. When the EDVAC was finally finished in 1951, it, ironically, was put to use by von Neumann to predict the weather.

Mauchly stayed with Eckert until 1959, when he left Sperry-Rand and formed his own consulting firm. While at Sperry-Rand and its predecessors, Mauchly designed logic circuits. Sperry-Rand lost a suit brought in 1968 by Honeywell claiming that John Vincent Atanasoff (1903–1995) had developed a computer that influenced Mauchly. This obviated previously granted patents. Both Eckert and Mauchly disagreed with the decision, but did not challenge it. As a result, both of them were put on the sidelines and kept from receiving much of the credit for the significant work they had done.

The pair had built a small stored program computer, the BINAC, to raise some money and keep Northrop as a client in the late 1940s. This was the first operational stored program computer in the United States. Therefore, Eckert and Mauchly considered themselves to have designed or suggested ENIAC, the stored program concept, BINAC, and UNIVAC in a little more than five years—a truly major feat of pioneering.

Some involved at the Moore School may have believed that Eckert and Mauchly claimed too much credit. But the facts are clear—without Eckert and Mauchly's contributions, the field of computing would have taken significantly longer to develop.

James E. Tomayko

Early Computers; Early Pioneers; Von Neumann, John.

Lee, J. A. N. Computer Pioneers. Los Alamitos, CA: IEEE Computer Society Press, 1995.

Stern, Nancy. From ENIAC to UNIVAC. Bedford, MA: Digital Press, 1981.