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ENIAC co-inventor explodes myths

14.02.2006
There are two epochs in computer history: Before ENIAC and After ENIAC. The first practical, all-electronic computer was unveiled on Feb. 14, 1946, at the University of Pennsylvania's Moore School of Electronics. While there are controversies about who invented what, there is universal agreement that the ENIAC (Electrical Numerical Integrator And Calculator) was the watershed project that showed electronic computing was possible. It was a masterpiece of electrical engineering, with unprecedented reliability and speed. The two men most responsible for its success were J. Presper Eckert and John W. Mauchly.

I recorded two days of interviews with "Pres" Eckert in 1989. He was 70 years old. My father was Pres' best friend from childhood and I'd spent my childhood playing with his children. I visited him regularly as an adult. On that day, we spoke in his living room in Gladwyne, Pa. -- most of the time sitting on the floor. We stopped talking about computers only to fiddle with his Nova Chord electronic organ, which predated ENIAC, and we fiddled with stereo speakers. On a second occasion I recorded a conversation at his daughter's home in western Massachusetts. Eckert died in 1995.

How did calculating machines work before ENIAC?

Well, a person with a paper and pencil can add two 10-digit numbers in about 10 seconds. With a hand calculator the time is down to 4 seconds. The Harvard Mark 4 was the last of the electromechanical computers -- it could add two 10-digit numbers in 0.3 seconds, about 30 times faster than paper and pencil.

When I was a graduate student, the Moore School of Electronics had two analyzers that were essentially copies of Vannevar Bush's machine from MIT.

What could that machine do?