CONNECTICUT LIBRARIES
December 1999, Vol. 41, No. 11
Before Bill Gates and Paul Allen, before Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, there was the automation tag team of John Mauchly and Presper Eckert. They designed and built ENIAC, the world's first digital, electronic computer. We may not recognize the names Mauchly and Eckert, but we have all heard stories about their creation. ENIAC was built from 18,000 vacuum tubes (transistors and circuit boards had not yet been invented). Since its parts were so large, the machine was massive, filling a huge room. It required a team to operate it. Engineers broke down complex mathematical problems into simple components. Programmers set up the machine to solve those problems. Assistants wheeled into place the units of the computer required to solve the problems, and rolled away those that were not. Technicians rushed in to replace overheated vacuum tubes as they failed, and fail they did. It weighed 30 tons and it cost $650 per hour in electricity just to keep vacuum tubes warmed up and the cooling fans going.World War II provided Mauchly and Eckert the resources to build ENIAC. The Army needed heavy artillery to win the war, and its gun crews needed firing tables to shoot the artillery with accuracy. Every time the Army built a new gun or designed a new shell, a fresh set of firing tables had to be produced from complicated mathematical calculations that took into account factors like the size of the gun, type of projectile, air temperature, wind speed, humidity, and wind direction. Computers were employed for this work-human computers who cranked out tables at the rate of one per month!
To boost productivity, the Army contracted with the Moore Engineering School of the University of Pennsylvania because Penn owned a Differential Analyzer, an electric-powered analog calculating machine. Unfortunately, the Analyzer was slow, prone to error, and useful for solving only one type of equation. However, the lieutenant in charge of the Army's program at Penn, Herman Goldstine, heard rumors about a professor named Mauchly who claimed that he could build an electronic device that would perform all of the math operations currently done by humans. Few faculty members at the engineering school took Mauchly seriously. Most ridiculed him.
John Mauchly was a physicist whose passion for weather prediction rekindled a childhood fascination with electricity and circuitry. He found that the mechanical calculators available at the time were too slow to deal with the massive amount of rainfall data that he and his students gathered. Mauchly believed that electronics might be the key to building a device that could execute high-speed mathematical calculations. He took courses in electronics, experimented with circuits and switches, and met with people who worked in related fields. In 1941, he got himself accepted into a military-sponsored electronics program at Penn.
There, he met 24-year-old Presper Eckert, an impulsive engineering genius who was attracted to Mauchly's vision of a machine that would use electrons moving at incredible speeds, rather than mechanical parts, to do mathematical calculations. In 1943, Lieutenant Goldstine, a talented mathematician himself, sold the concept to the military top brass who were desperate to put science to work in the war effort. ENIAC was completed too late to help win WWII, but it was employed after the War to solve problems related to artillery firing, hydrogen bomb development, weather prediction, and wind tunnel design. It was the template for future computers. Mauchly and Eckert went on to found their own computer company and to build a civilian successor to ENIAC. The new machine, UNIVAC, successfully forecast Eisenhower's landslide victory over Stevenson in the 1952 presidential election.
So, why are Mauchly and Eckert unknown to most of us? Mauchly and Eckert were all too human. They delayed in filing for their patent. They quarreled with their superiors at Penn. They suffered major business and personal losses. They were overshadowed by more established members of the scientific community who may have taken more credit for their contributions to ENIAC than they deserved. They were casualties in battles among large corporations. Finally, they lost their claim in a controversial court decision when Honeywell challenged the validity of their patent.
Author Scott McCartney believes that the judge's 1972 ENIAC decision placed the patent claims of Mauchly and Eckert second to the interests of the U.S. economy. The judge chose to open up the computer industry to more players and more competition. The antitrust case against Microsoft reached a major step, but not a final resolution, the night I emailed this review to our CL Editor. Bill Gates and company will find no comfort in the ENIAC precedent.
Thank you Mauchly and Eckert for the computers we take for granted today. Thank you also for five decades of computer industry innovation, computer industry shakeouts, and computer industry lawsuits!
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