Inventions and Inventors Volume 1 - Online Public Access Catalog

312
ENIAC computer
ENIAC computer
The invention: The first general-purpose electronic digital computer.
The people behind the invention:
John Presper Eckert (1919-1995), an electrical engineer
John William Mauchly (1907-1980), a physicist, engineer, and
professor
John von Neumann (1903-1957), a Hungarian American
mathematician, physicist, and logician
Herman Heine Goldstine (1913- ), an army mathematician
Arthur Walter Burks (1915- ), a philosopher, engineer, and
professor
John Vincent Atanasoff (1903-1995), a mathematician and
physicist
A Technological Revolution
The Electronic Numerical Integrator and Calculator (ENIAC) was
the first general-purpose electronic digital computer. By demonstrating
the feasibility and value of electronic digital computation, it initiated
the computer revolution. The ENIAC was developed during
World War II (1939-1945) at the Moore School of Electrical Engineering
by a team headed by John William Mauchly and John Presper
Eckert, who were working on behalf of the U.S. Ordnance Ballistic
Research Laboratory (BRL) at the Aberdeen Proving Ground in
Maryland. Early in the war, the BRL’s need to generate ballistic firing
tables already far outstripped the combined abilities of the available
differential analyzers and teams of human computers.
In 1941, Mauchly had seen the special-purpose electronic computer
developed by John Vincent Atanasoff to solve sets of linear
equations. Atanasoff’s computer was severely limited in scope and
was never fully completed. The functioning prototype, however,
helped convince Mauchly of the feasibility of electronic digital computation
and so led to Mauchly’s formal proposal in April, 1943, to
develop the general-purpose ENIAC. The BRL, in desperate need of
computational help, agreed to fund the project, with Lieutenant