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Interview with One of ENIACs Inventors
deeptrace writes "On the 60th anniversary of the ENIAC an old family friend of 'Pres' Eckert transcribed some interviews recorded before his death. Very interesting reading. They dispel a few myths, such as the lights didn't really dim when they turned it on, and the military officers did not salute ENIAC."
It's just a darn shame they stole all that technology, eh? Although Eckert disputes it at the end of the interview, the court found that: "...John Vincent Atanasoff and Clifford Berry had constructed the first electronic digital computer at Iowa State College in the 1939 - 1942 period. He had also ruled that John Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert, who had for more than twenty-five years been feted, trumpeted, and honored as the co-inventors of the first electronic digital computer, were not entitled to the patent upon which that honor was based. Furthermore, Judge Larson had ruled that Mauchly had pirated Atanasoff's ideas, and for more than thirty years had palmed those ideas off on the world as the product of his own genius." Full Q&A can be found here: http://www.scl.ameslab.gov/ABC/Trial.html Court documents can be found here: http://www.cs.iastate.edu/jva/court-papers/index.s html
Or for that matter, the perennial controversy over whether honours for first digital computer should go to the British working at Bletchley Park on the Enigma decoders. I don't have a bias here (well, not much), but you need to remember that there were a several teams working on electronic digital computing around the world, and many of them were top-secret projects.
So, if you popped the clutch, your constants may jump in value?
Ok, Ok, I'm leaving!
Q&A by Alexander Randall 5th
FEBRUARY 14, 2006 (COMPUTERWORLD) - J. Presper Eckert
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. I've had the interview tapes for many years, but decided to transcribe them for ENIAC's 60th anniversary.
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?
It could solve linear differential equations, but only linear equations. It had a long framework divided into sections with a couple dozen shafts buried through it. You could put different gears on the shafts using screwdrivers and hammers and it had "integrators," that gave [the] product of two shafts coming in on a third shaft coming out. By picking the right gear ratio you should get the right constants in the equation. We used published tables to pick the gear ratios to get whatever number you wanted. The limit on accuracy of this machine was the slippage of the mechanical wheels on the integrator.
That made me say, "Let's built electronic integrators and stick them into this machine instead of those wheel things." We added several dozen motors and amplifiers and circuits using over 400 vacuum tubes, which, as electronic things go, is not trivial. The radio has only five or six tubes, and television sets have up to 30. The Nova Chord organ was built prior to this and it has about 170 tubes. The Bush Analyzer was still essentially a mechanical device.
The mouse cage was pretty funny. We knew mice would eat the insulation off the wires, so we got samples of all the wires that were available and put them in a cage with a bunch of mice to see which insulation they did not like. We only used wire that passed the mouse test.
This should be taken to heart by forward-thinking engineers everywhere.ENIAC had 18,000 vacuum tubes. The tubes were off the shelf; we got whatever the distributor could supply in lots of a thousand. We used 10 tube types, but could have done it with four tube types; we just couldn't get enough of them. We decided that our tube filaments would last a lot longer if we kept them below their proper voltage. Not too high or too low. A lot of the circuits were off the shelf, but I invented a lot of the circuits as well. Registers were a new idea. So were integrator circuits.
And you thought your PC or laptop got hot! I suspect the voltage adjustment helped keep the heat down, but even 1 tube gets pretty hot after an hour or so. Marshmallow roast anyone?
GetOuttaMySpace - The Anti-Social Network
I'm looking to overclock my ENIAC. Any tips?
Also, does anyone have a copy of Gentoo on punch cards I can borrow?
Slashdot Burying Stories About Slashdot Media Owned
Um, guess it depends on what you mean by "computing".
Years before the ENIAC was running, IBM was SELLING big ugly boxes that could add, subtract, and multiply, all electronically:
http://www-03.ibm.com/ibm/history/history/year_194 3.html
Fenynman used these at Los Alamos in 1944 to compute critical massses of Plutonium.
And these were programmable, to an extent, with plugboards, which incidentally was more flexible that the ENIAC arrangment of plugs and cables. You could swap plugboards in 5 seconds; reconfiguring ENIAC for a new program could take many many hours.
Eventually ENIAC was re-architected to take instructions from a huge bank of switches, before that it was program by plug.
That led me to examine if I could find some way to multiply pulse numbers together so I didn't need gears -- then I could do the whole thing electrically. There's a theorem in calculus where you can use two integrators to do a multiplication. I talked with John Mauchley about it. Just who put in which part is hard to tell, but the idea of doing the integrations by counters was mine.
.00002 seconds -- that's 50,000 times faster than a human, 20,000 times faster than a calculator and 1,500 times faster than the Mark 1. For specialized scientific calculations it was even faster.
The ENIAC was the first electronic digital computer and could add those two 10-digit numbers in
So it's a myth that ENIAC could only add, subtract, multiply and divide.
No, that's a calculator. ENIAC could do three-dimensional, second-order differential equations. We were calculating trajectory tables for the war effort. In those days. The trajectory tables were calculated by hundreds of people operating desk calculators -- people who were called computers. So the machine that does that work was called a computer.
So what did they give you? Did they say, "Here's a room, here are some tools, here are some guys -- go make it?"
Uh-huh. Pretty much.
What did ENIAC's room look like?
We built ENIAC in a room that was 30 feet by 50 feet, at the Moore School in West Philadelphia on the first floor.
There's a story that ENIAC dimmed the lights in Philadelphia when it was in use.
That story is total fiction, dreamed up by some journalist. We took power off of the grid. We had voltage regulators to provide 150 kilowatts of regulated supply.
Did the military guys working on ENIAC salute the machine?
Another ENIAC myth.
You said the largest tube gadget in 1943 was the Nova Chord electronic organ. What did ENIAC use?
ENIAC had 18,000 vacuum tubes. The tubes were off the shelf; we got whatever the distributor could supply in lots of a thousand. We used 10 tube types, but could have done it with four tube types; we just couldn't get enough of them. We decided that our tube filaments would last a lot longer if we kept them below their proper voltage. Not too high or too low. A lot of the circuits were off the shelf, but I invented a lot of the circuits as well. Registers were a new idea. So were integrator circuits.
The function of the machine was split into eight basic circuit components: the accumulator, initiator, master programmer, multiplier, divider/square-root, gate, buffer, and the function tables. The accumulator was the basic arithmetic unit of the ENIAC. It consisted of 20 registers, each 10 digits wide, which performed addition, subtraction and temporary storage. The accumulator can be compared to the registers in today's central processing units.
General: This is the ENIAC 3000. It launches missiles automatically, and it has three distinct varieties of orders.
[presses a button]
ENIAC: Men, take that hill.
War is hell.
Don't shoot till you see the whites of their eyes.
Colonel 1: Man, that thing's great!
Colonel 2: Don't salute the machine!
Oh, right. Next thing you'll say is Al Gore didn't invent the internet.
Proverbs 21:19
Have your moment of glory, then remember that the first true programmable computer was invented in Manchester, England (the Manchester University Mark 1 A.K.A. 'The Baby'). ENIAC had to be reprogrammed by moving countless cables around, in the words of one of the operators "each time we changed the software we had to almost completely rebuild the machine". The Manchester University machine stored both its program and data in memory using special cathode ray tubes.
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manchester_Mark_I
Ed Almos
Budapest, Hungary
The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws. - Tacitus, 56-120 A.D.
I really think that J. Presper Eckert (the ENIAC inventor ) and Von Neumann both deserve credit. Eckert said it himself in the interview:
However Von Neumann did a lot of theoretical work on algorithms (he is cited by Knuth on the merge sort algorithm) and cellular automata.
Certainly Von Neumann was ahead of his time, he was already thinking in general-purpose algorithms, while the ENIAC only worked to solve differential equations.
I'm not trying to discredit anybody, but IMHO Eckert should have chose the wrong wording when claiming to be *THE* inventor of the computer.
Putting together a machine like that is an amazing feat. Using other people's ideas is the hallmark of great engineers. Taking credit for other people's ideas is the hallmark of great losers.
As TFA says, whether you think of Eckert and Mauchly as the first to build a computer or not, ENIAC is the "watershed event". A lot of people in the U.S. think of Henry Ford as the inventor of the automobile, even though if you press them they probably remember that he was not, by many years and an ocean.
Dan Bricklin, inventor of the electronic spreadsheet, was sued by Lotus Corp. for violating the 'look and feel' of their 1-2-3 product with his Visicalc. Never mind that their entire product was based on his beautiful idea, he got sued out of business for copying their menu structure.
What the courts decide and what actually happened are often not entirely in sync.
sigs, as if you care.
During the summer of 2004, my girlfriend at the time had a job taking care of an old guy at his beach house on Long Beach Island, NJ. The old guy grew up in Philly society back in the 30's and 40's and was part of the Doan family, owners of a prominent Chevrolet dealership. I was living at the house too and got to talking to the guy one day and told him I was involved with computers. Then he starts telling me all about how his wife (who had died recently) had dated a guy named Pres Eckert who had invented "some computer". I told him it was the ENIAC and pressed him for details. He told me his wife had dumped Pres because he was always taking her to see the machine and would make her sit around waiting for him to fix some problems before they went on dates. So, this could probably be the first instance of a guy being dumped for being a computer geek.
Founder, Americans Allied Against Alliteration
We built ENIAC in a room that was 30 feet by 50 feet, at the Moore School in West Philadelphia on the first floor.
And on the second floor, we have a room 10 feet by 15 feet where we built the ENIAC Mini, which of course since it doesn't have a teletype, punch card reader or mouse, is more affordable.
Finding other idiots on
Looking back at ENIAC we can now say that the first version of Scorched Earth was born.
---------
This space for rent. Call 1-800-SIGADVT to place your ad.
Are there any of your circuits still in use in today's personal computers?
No, but that's true of any first invention. Edison's original light bulb bears no resemblance to a modern bulb. They do the same thing but with totally different components. Same with the computer. What did survive were the concepts, not the hardware. The idea of a subroutine was original with ENIAC. Mauchly had this idea based on his knowledge of the inner workings of desk calculators and introduced me to his idea for a subroutine in the machine. On Mark-1, if they wanted to do a calculation over and over they had to feed the same tape in over and over. We invented ways to run the same subroutine without any mechanical input. The idea of using internal memory was also original with ENIAC.
There's a story that some guy was running around with a box of tubes and had to change one every few minutes.
Another myth. We had a tube fail about every two days and we could locate the problem within 15 minutes. We invented a scheme to build the computer on removable chassis -- plug-in components -- so when tubes failed we could swap them out in seconds. We carried out a very radical idea in a very conservative fashion.
How many people were working on ENIAC?
Total count was about 50 people, 12 of us engineers or technical people. Mauchley was teaching part-time, others had part-time jobs. I was on it full-time as chief engineer.
How old were you?
We signed the contract on my 24th birthday: May 9, 1943.
Was ENIAC programmable?
Yes and no. We programmed the machine by plugging wires in from place to place. That's not hard-wired; it's not software; it's not memory. It's pluggable programming. And we had switches to set the functions.
What was the first thing you did with ENIAC?
It was designed to calculate trajectory tables, but it came too late to really help with the war effort. The first real use was Edward Teller using ENIAC to do calculations for the hydrogen bomb.
What's the zaniest thing you did while developing ENIAC?
The mouse cage was pretty funny. We knew mice would eat the insulation off the wires, so we got samples of all the wires that were available and put them in a cage with a bunch of mice to see which insulation they did not like. We only used wire that passed the mouse test.
What prepared you for building an electronic computer?
Remember, in that era, Philadelphia was "Vacuum Tube Valley." Radios and televisions were predominantly made in Philadelphia. I worked on primitive television at Farnsworth back as a teenager, and at Penn I had been working on various radar problems trying to measure the time for a pulse to go out and come back. I figured that out with counters. All this is a good lead-in for building an electronic computer.
I found a ISO link to download it.. html
http://www.roadsideamerica.com/attract/KSCAWtwine
I don't see a torrent anywhere.
Hoestly, I'm amazed they even felt the need to dispel such myths. Anyone who believed either is an idiot. Well, OK, I suppose maybe people could be excused for not having any sense of how electricity works, or how the difference in scale between a room-sized computer and the entire electrical grid of Philadelphia; But the saluting thing? Come on. Even the basest fool could quickly figure out that saluting is like unto handshaking, and that no officer (even a fresh ROTC butterbar) would be so dense as to salute a machine. The machine has no rank, and can't salute back!* There is more sense even in the old joke about saluting the refrigerator because it says on the front "General Electric".
* special exception: the flag is saluted, despite having no capability of saluting back, but it could be argued that the flag has near-infinite rank...
Conclusion: the Empire squashes the Federation like a bug. Accept it.
Babbage+Lovelace probably come closest to being the inventors of IT, and were recognised as such in particular by Turing, but they never saw the actual machine running in their lifetimes. At any rate, there are many more candidates, contributors and contenders for this honor than one usually learns at school or from the news media...
Here is one very interesting article by an author not to be confused with the interviewer (as they are bearing almost the same last name): Randell, From Analytical Engine to Electronic Digital Computer, http://www.cs.ncl.ac.uk/research/pubs/articles/pap ers/398.pdf
The assertion that Thomas Edison invented the light bulb is also quite popular in Newcastle, because Joseph Swan was a Wearsider.
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
You need to look here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zuse
Before you make your rash statements about the Colossus being first.
there are 3 kinds of people:
* those who can count
* those who can't
I have direct knowledge of the first major program they ran with the ENIAC, because my dad was there when they did it. It was a program to calculate the first 1000 digits of Pi... and it worked too. They had a process by which you had to review any functions that were going into the computer before you put them in... if only we still did that. Expensive but extremely effective at reducing software bugs in code... the only time the machine was down was for tubes and hardware.
stuff |
The Eniac was a team effort; my grandfather was in the team that helped solve the math of the beast; not just computation but also thing like making sure the Eniac didn't need the power of a small city to work.
When he died, we found some of his notes about the Eniac in old notebook which we donated to the Smithsonian.
CDE open sourced! https://sourceforge.net/projects/cdesktopenv/
Interestingly enough, the first piece of software proposed for the ENIAC has yet to be finished.
Apparently the Duke Nukem Forever team are finding backwards-compatibility with the old ENIAC hardware a bit tricky.
Cress, cress, lovely lovely cress
...a real interview, with answered questions and everything.
C'mon CmdrTaco! Don't you have that ouija-board Apache kernel module working right yet?
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
should have chose the wrong wording -> should NOT have chosen. :-/
Seems Unlikely
The ENIAC had only 20 registers, holding 10 decimal digits each. Kinda hard to generate 1000 digits with only 200 digits of storage. There are algorithms that generate sequential digits of Pi, but I doubt if they were well known at that time.
>They had a process by which you had to review any functions that were going into the computer before you put them in...
Well, of course, because it took a lot of time and work to rewire the computer to run a new algorithm. And people were worth $2 an hour, while the computer probably was worth $100 an hour or more.
>Expensive but extremely effective at reducing software bugs in code...
I doubt if the early programmers were any better at finding bugs ahead of time than we are. They had the added complications of having to take into acount propagation delay and the many hardware glitches of each module. >The only time the machine was down was for tubes and hardware.
Er, No, it had to go down completely for reprogramming.
whatever, the internet can go hang.
I'm more impressed with his work protecting the space-time continueum.
Come read my stupid blagablog. Rants and Giggles
The abacus was first. About 500BCE, I'm guessing, maybe older.
http://www.ee.ryerson.ca/~elf/abacus/intro.html
http://www.ee.ryerson.ca/~elf/abacus/history.html
"It is shocking to have your life work reduced to a tenth of a square inch of silicon." -- ENIAC co-inventor J. Presper Eckert
I don't think your post makes sense. The Manchester Mark I was constructed post-ENIAC. Even though it might have been in development before, so it could count as a parallel discovery, it wasn't first by anyone's account.
The first Turing-complete machine actually constructed (to the best of both my and Wikipedia's knowledge) was the Z3, built by Konrad Zuse in 1941, in Germany. Nazi Germany. It was blown up in 1944, so it probably can't really be counted as the progenitor of modern computing; however, if you're looking to assign credit for "first invention" of a computer, after Charles Babbage, it's probably Zuse that you'd want to be looking at.
The reason that ENIAC is so important -- and recognized as being "a first," if not "the first" -- is because it's the beginning of a direct lineage which extends to the computer you're (probably) using today.
Perhaps if either the Germans had won the war or we hadn't bombed wherever the Z3 was being stored and captured it afterwards, then history would be told differently. Or if the British government hadn't been so secretive about the Colossus machines after the war. Or if Charles Babbage had been as good an engineer as he was a designer. There are lots of what-ifs that we can play, which would change how the story stands.
There are a lot of people who could have been first, if only circumstances had been slightly different. But they weren't, and so they're going to be stuck as a footnote to ENIAC in the history books. Is this fair? Arugably not; but it's life happens. Sometimes you're there at the right time in the right place, and sometimes you're just not.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
He's the daddy!
I hate those big wooden/metal/ivory pixels sliding around on wires, and all you can manage to create is a single desktop icon before you run out of them.
Mainframe/UNIX Bit Twiddler and long time Windows/Linux Hobbyist.
The Theorem Theorem: If If, Then Then.
In the interview, Eckert mentions two concepts, still important in modern computers, which first appeared in the ENIAC. He says, "The idea of a subroutine was original with ENIAC." He also says, "The idea of using internal memory was also original with ENIAC." In fact, Ada Byron (who became the Countess Lady Lovelace) is usually credited with inventing the subroutine. She wrote programs for Babbage's Analytical Engine, which was never completed. The Analytical Engine design also had internal memory. This was about a century before the ENIAC.
19th century engineering wasn't really up to building the Analytical Engine. Babbage famously said, late in his life, that he would gladly give up the rest of his time if he could spend just three days 500 years in the future. Of course a man who was really out of this time was Leonardo DaVinci, who sketched a 13 digit cogwheel digital adder in the 15th century.
The parent is of course refering to Colossus
From IMDB (Colossus: The Forbin Project, 1970): "Trivia: Though the writers could not have known it, the first useful electronic "supercomputer" was also called "Colossus". The Colossus Mk2 was used by the British to decipher German radio transmissions in WWII, and was kept a secret until 1974."
Good movie, look it up.
Indeed...
In 1998, it was even proven that his Z3 computer was Turing Complete.
Another good link is here
I was born and live in the US, read world news, am routinely disgusted with the actions of my government, and yet I knew ENIAC was far from the first digital computer. Yet, Americans are not ignorant through and through, you know. The difference between myself and the bulk of my compatriots? I read, I avoid the american news networks and print media for international news, and steer clear of that myopic belief that the US = the world. There's still hope.
Considering when I attended Iowa State a group of engineers rebuilt a replica of the ABC and put it on tour around Iowa and the Smithsonian, I'd say it worked pretty well.
The drum from the original is under plexiglass in the Computer Science center.