Subject: Re: J.Presper Eckert Jr. Dead at 76
From: [email-masked] (Jon Kale)
Date: 10 Jun 1995 09:38:00 +0100
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers

In message <[email-masked]> Bob Morrisette wrote:
>
> Eckert, co-designer of the ENIAC died last Saturday. 
> The ENIAC ran from 1945 to 1955 and was the first
> general-purpose electronic digital computer.
> (subject to some debate)
> 
> We should not forget those who pioneered our industry.
> 
> Sabu

From The Times, June 9th (copyright almost certainly belongs to News Intl. 
but reproduced entirely without permission.)

'They called it "Eniac", an acronym which stood for Electronic Numerical
Integrator and Computer. It weighe 30 tons, occupied a whole room, and
resembled something from an early science-fiction movie with its flashing
pink lights, clicking switches and miles of cable. But it worked: just in
time to confirm the design calculations for the world's first atomic bomb 
in 1945. Today's desktop computers, thogh a thousand times faster and a tiny
fraction of the size, still use the same principles as the Eniac design.

John Presper Eckert and his collaborator, John Mauchly, who died in 1980,
had begun work on their computer in 1942, in an effort to solve the problems 
of compiling ballistic tables for the US Army's artillery batteries.These 
tables, which involved intricate calculations of wind, humidity, target
elevation, distance and the weight of the shell had been a bugbear of 
artillery officers for centuries. They had to be reformulated every time a 
small change was made to the guns or ammunition, and during the Second World
War the Army became desperate to find some way to simplify the task.

Working at the University of Pennsylvania, Eckert and Mauchly designed a
computer which contained more than 18,000 vacuum tubes, receiving 
instructions through hundreds of cables that resembled an old fashioned
telephone exchange. The data was fed in by means of stacks of punched cards,
and the machine then converted the numbers to a series of 1s and 0s, sending
the resultant stream of data through a series of switches called logical
"and" and "or" elements. The result was a machine that could complete in 30
seconds a trajectory which had previously taken a clerk 20 hours. 
Fortuitously, though it was not designed for the purpose, it also proved to
be the only device capable of assisting the Manhattan Project.

Eniac continued to operate until 1955, but Eckert and Mauchly had moved on
at the end of the war to found their own computer firm, the Electronic
Control Company, which developed the Binac and Univac computers. The company
was later sold to Remington Rand and eventually became the Unisys 
Corporation, for which Eckert worked in a senior position until his 
retirement in 1989.

The holder of 87 patents, Eckert was involved in controversy in 1973 when a
federal court held that one of the most crucial parts of the Eniac design
was based on the pioneering work of Dr John Atanasoff, who had invented a
computing device called ABC in the 1930s. Eckert vehemently denied the 
claim. "He never really got anything to work," he said later. "He had no
programming system. Mauchly and I achieved a complete workable computer 
system. Others had not."

Presper Eckert is survived by his wife Judith, three sons and one daughter.'

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