* ENIAC: The Triumphs and Tragedies of the World's First Computer by Scott McCartney, Berkley Publishing, $12.95, 262 pages.
The Chapel Hill News
August 15, 2001
The tragedy of two pioneers
By Phillip Manning
John Mauchly and Pres Eckhart are largely unknown today. But in
a fascinating book, Scott McCartney makes the case that these
two men started the Information Age by building the first programmable
digital computer ("ENIAC: The Triumphs and Tragedies of the
World's First Computer," Berkley Publishing, $12.95).
The machine Mauchly and Eckhart built was called the Electronic
Numerical Integrator and Computer or ENIAC. Their story reminded
me of an aphorism I heard decades ago in the computer business:
"It's easy to recognize pioneers in our business; they're
the ones with arrows in their backs." And Mauchly and Eckhart
were pioneers.
Mauchly grew up in a modest home in Maryland. Pres Eckhart was
a blue blood from a wealthy Philadelphia family. Mauchly was a
dreamer, a big thinker; Eckhart was a doer, a brilliant engineer.
However, the two men had one thing in common: a passionate interest
in electronics.
In 1932, Mauchly was teaching physics at Ursinus College and pursuing
his long-standing interest of developing a mathematical model
to predict the weather. He obtained reams of data from the Weather
Bureau but soon realized that it would take years to perform the
necessary calculations on the mechanical calculators available
to him. The problem led him to the concept of an electronic calculating
machine. He began wiring circuits at home, and in 1941 he visited
John Atanasoff, a professor at Iowa State, who had built a prototype
calculator that used electrical circuits. Shortly afterward, Mauchly
was accepted in an electronics course at the University of Pennsylvania.
His instructor was Pres Eckhart.
The dreamer and the engineer became fast friends and spent hours
talking about electronic calculating machines. In 1942, Mauchly
wrote a proposal titled "The Use of High-Speed Vacuum Tubes
for Calculations." The deans at the university dismissed
the idea "as the unsophisticated musings of a man known to
have a lot of pipe dreams." Mauchly and Eckhart's break came
because the country was at war. Artillery gunners relied on firing
tables to determine how far a shell would fly. A team of women,
called "computers," used mechanical calculators to produce
the tables, and it took a month or more to compile one. When the
Army heard about a man who wanted to build a lightning-fast electronic
computer, they dispatched an officer to investigate.
In April 1943, Mauchly and Eckhart were granted $61,700 to begin
work on ENIAC. The machine was finished in the fall of 1945, just
after the war ended. It was an apartment-sized 30-ton monster
with 17,468 vacuum tubes, 500,000 soldered joints, 70,000 resistors,
and 10,000 capacitors. "It was," McCartney writes, "1,000
times faster than any existing calculator." ENIAC became
a workhorse for the Army, and its success generated a thousand
fathers.
The University of Pennsylvania tried to take credit for the project,
and the Army believed the computer was its idea. But the most
important claim came from the famous mathematician John von Neumann.
The ENIAC project had been under way for almost a year before
von Neumann got involved, but he was soon meeting regularly with
the team. One often-discussed topic was how ENIAC's successor
would operate. Mauchly and Eckhart had been talking about a new
generation of computers for some time, but von Neumann wrote the
first report. The ideas in that report became known as the von
Neumann architecture, the same architecture used in today's computers.
The report mentioned Mauchly once and Eckhart not at all. Years
later, Eckhart said, "We were clearly suckered by John von
Neumann, who succeeded in some circles at getting my ideas called
the 'von Neumann architecture.'" Later, the two men started
the Eckhart-Mauchly Computer Company, which built a new computer
called UNIVAC. But the company was under-financed, and they were
forced to sell it to Remington Rand. Although UNIVAC was a technical
success, sales soon fell behind those of IBM, whose computers
were backed by a huge research budget and sales force. The men
who built the first programmable digital computer and started
the first commercial computer company were forgotten. All they
had left was their patent.
Eckhart and Mauchly had filed for the patent in 1947. Its claims
were broad, encompassing every aspect of computer design. Nevertheless,
after many challenges, it was granted in 1964. The Sperry Corporation,
which had bought Remington Rand, was ready to charge royalties
on every computer built in the United States. Honeywell filed
a lawsuit against Sperry, accusing the company of creating a "virtual
monopoly" on computers. Honeywell located John Atanasoff,
whom Mauchly had visited back in 1941. The judge in the case saw
merit in opening up the burgeoning computer industry. He used
Atanasoff's machine, which in no way resembled ENIAC, to invalidate
Eckhart and Mauchly's patent. The pioneering pair were left with
nothing - no credit for their accomplishments, no money, no patent.
Mauchly wrote in his diary in 1977, "So much has been taken
away." When he died three years later, Pres Eckhart cried
all night.
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