Rash's Surname Index
Notes for John Presper Jr. ECKERT
Chicago Tribune (IL) - June 7, 1995
Deceased Name: COMPUTER PIONEER JOHN PRESPER ECKERT INVENTOR CLAIMED THE FIRST ELECTRONIC DIGITAL SYSTEM
John Presper Eckert, co-inventor of the mammoth ENIAC computer in 1945, believed by many computer experts and historians to be the first electronic digital computer, died on Saturday in Bryn Mawr, Pa. He was 76 and lived in Gladwyn, Pa.
The cause was complications from leukemia, said Thomas Miller, a family friend
Working under an Army contract in World War II to automate artillery calculations, Mr. Eckert and John W. Mauchly, who died in 1980, designed a computer with more than 18,000 vacuum tubes that received instructions through hundreds of cables resembling an old-time telephone switchboard.
The 30-ton Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer, or ENIAC, was assembled in late 1945 and could complete in 30 seconds a trajectory calculation that took a clerk 20 hours. Stacks of punched cards provided the data. The computer at times was used in later stages of the Manhattan Project.
Mr. Eckert and Mauchly founded a company that became a predecessor of the Unisys Corp., and Mr. Eckert obtained 87 patents.
Controversy dogged the inventors. In a case in 1973 a federal court canceled a crucial patent. The court ruled that the root of the ENIAC design was the pioneering work of John Atanasoff, who had invented a computing device called ABC in the 1930s.
Critics said that Atanasoff had never used his computer for solving practical problems and that it could solve only a class of problems called simultaneous linear equations.
In a letter to a group of students in 1990, Mr. Eckert called Atanasoff's work at the University of Iowa a joke. "He never really got anything to work," Mr. Eckert wrote. "He had no programming system. Mauchly and I achieved a complete workable computer system. Others had not."
In any case, only ENIAC could confirm design calculations for the atomic bomb.
Although ENIAC resembled a scene from a 1950s science fiction movie, its flashing pink lights, clicking switches and miles of cables hid a design remarkably similar-in concept, at least-to modern personal computers.
Modern computers execute instructions more than 1,000 times faster than ENIAC, and their sophisticated software and desktop designs make them many times more efficient and easy to use. But the basic process of breaking a number into a series of 1's and 0's and sending the resulting stream of data through a series of switches called logical "and" and "or" elements, is shared with ENIAC's design.
Mr. Eckert is also credited with having solved the thorny problem of reliability by running the delicate vacuum tubes, which failed often, at low voltage and avoiding brittle solder connections by relying on hundreds of old-fashioned plugs. By rearranging the plugs and their cables, the computer could be reprogrammed to solve a wide variety of problems.
J. Presper Eckert Jr., as he preferred to be known, was born in Philadelphia. He earned a bachelor's degree at the Moore School of Electrical Engineering at the University of Pennsylvania and joined the faculty there.
In 1946, Mr. Eckert and Mauchly founded the Electronic Control Co. and were co-developers of the BINAC and Univac computers. Their successor business, the Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corp., was sold to the Remington Rand Corp., which, after mergers and name changes, became Unisys
| HOME | EMAIL | SURNAMES |
Return to The Pennocks of Primitive Hall website.
The information in this database may contain errors. If you find any questionable data, or if you have something to add my findings, please feel free to e-mail me by clicking on the "E-MAIL" link above. Thank you!
Page built by Gedpage Version 2.21 ©2009 on 07 July 2020