Encyclopedia of Computer Science and Technology

Eckert, J. Presper 167• There is never a shortage of copies or the need for areader to wait for access.• many digital libraries allow full searching of the textof all volumes. Libraries can also use a common dataformat (such as “Open Archives.”) to make their materialsearchable throughout the Internet.• many older, hard-to-find books can be made more“discoverable” and accessible.Project Gutenberg is one of the oldest and best-knowndigital library projects, dating back to 1971. Most of thecollection consists of scanned or transcribed texts of publicdomain (no longer subject to copyright) books. As of late2007, Project Gutenberg had more than 17,000 differenttitles in its collection.Of course more recent books are covered by copyright.In order to include copyrighted books in a digital library,some sort of compensation to the copyright holder generallyneeds to be made, and it is unclear how that might beimplemented in a way that preserves free access.There are also what might be called “digital pseudolibraries”such as Google Book Search. Google has beenscanning part or all of the collections of universities such asStanford, Harvard, and Oxford as well as the New York PublicLibrary. Google provides full access to public domainbooks (or those for which permission has been obtainedfrom the publisher). For copyrighted books there is a limitedability to search by keyword and view a limited numberof pages. Amazon.com’s “Search inside the Book” worksrather similarly, but only with books for which the publisherhas granted permission.Google’s initiative has aroused some controversy because,according to traditional practice, someone wanting access toa copyrighted work beyond “fair use” is supposed to obtainpermission. Google has reversed this presumption, allowingpublishers who do not want their material to be available toopt out. The Authors Guild of America and the Association ofAmerican Publishers have separately sued Google for copyrightinfringement. Google argues that the limited amountof text provided for copyrighted books falls within the fairuse provisions of copyright law. The authors and publishers,however, point to the fact that Google is copying thewhole text of the book in order to allow for searching.If the legal issues can be settled in such a way as toallow robust digital libraries, the benefits for researcherswill be considerable. Google already offers a “my library”feature that users can use to search for books they alreadyknow and organize and search them digitally.Further ReadingGoogle Book Search. Available online. URL: http://books.google.com/. Accessed September 16, 2007.Hirschhorn, Michael. “The Hapless Seed: Publishers and AuthorsShould Stop Cowering. Google Is Less Likely to Destroy theBook Business Than to Slingshot It into the 21st Century.”Atlantic Monthly, June 2007, p. 134 ff.Kelly, Kevin. “Scan This Book!” New York Times Magazine, May 14,2006. pp. 42–49, 64, 71.Kresh, Diane, ed. The Whole Digital Library Handbook. Chicago:American Library Association, 2007.Lesk, Michael. Understanding Digital Libraries. 2nd ed. San Francisco:Morgan Kaufmann, 2004.Project Gutenberg. Available online. URL: http://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Main_Page. Accessed September 16, 2007.Thompson, Bob. “Google Wants to Digitize Every Book. PublishersSay Read the Fine Print First.” Washington Post, August12, 2006, p. D1.Eckert, J. Presper(1919–1995)AmericanComputer EngineerJ. Presper Eckert played a key role in the design of what isoften considered to be the first general-purpose electronicdigital computer, then went on to pioneer the commercialcomputer industry. An only child, Eckert grew up ina prosperous Philadelphia family that traveled widely andhad many connections with Hollywood celebrities such asDouglas Fairbanks and Charlie Chaplin. He was a star studentin his private high school and also did well at the Universityof Pennsylvania, where he graduated in 1941 with adegree in electrical engineering and a strong mathematicsbackground.Continuing at the university as a graduate student andresearcher, Eckert met an older researcher, John Mauchly.They found they shared a deep interest in the possibilitiesof electronic computing, a technology that was beingspurred by the needs of war research. After earning hismaster’s degree in electrical engineering, in 1942 Eckertjoined Mauchly in submitting a proposal to the BallisticResearch Laboratory of the Army Ordnance Department fora computer that could be used to calculate urgently neededfiring tables for guns, bombs, and missiles. The Armygranted the contract, and they organized a team that grewto 50 people. Begun in April 1943, their ENIAC (ElectronicNumerical Integrator and Computer) was finished in 1946.While it was too late to aid the war effort, the room-sizemachine filled with 18,000 vacuum tubes demonstrated thepracticability of electronic computing. Its computation rateof 5,000 additions per second far exceeded other calculatorsof the time.With some input from mathematician John von Neumann,Eckert and Mauchly began to develop a newmachine, EDVAC, for the University of Pennsylvania (seevon Neumann, John). While this effort was still underway, they formed their own business, the Eckert-MauchlyComputer Corporation and began to develop the BINAC(BINary Automatic Computer), which was intended to bea (relatively) compact and lower-cost version of ENIAC.This machine demonstrated a key principle of modern computers—thestorage of program instructions along withdata. The ability to store, manipulate, and edit instructionsvastly increased the flexibility and ease of use of computingmachines (see history of computing).By the late 1940s, Eckert and Mauchly began to developUnivac I, the first commercial implementation of the newcomputing technology. When financial difficulties threatenedto sink their company in 1950, it was acquired by