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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?"
1. No one person invented the computer.
2. Eniac worked while Atanasoff's system didn't
3. Was Eniac inspired by Atansoff's work? Probably. Was it a copy? No.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Didn't you get the memo? An invention doesn't count until someone in the US does it! ;)
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.
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!
I don't really feel that there is an "America vs. Europe" fight. Perhaps it is a bit of friendly rivalry - or like trying to out-perform your parents.
The honor of the first stored-program digitial computer should probably go to Konrad Zuse for his Z3 machine. It was electro-mechanical, but has been proven to be Turing complete.
Indeed. The whole discussion about about "electronic" vs. "electro-mechanical" serves only one purpose, namely to give all credit to the ENIAC team and no credit to Konrad Zuse. It really does not matter whether a computer is based on relays, tubes, TTL transistors or field effect transistors. In all those implementations we find a timed gate controlling a current, the basic idea of a binary operation. Besides, all those components are typically found in an electronics catalog these days.
There is actually a good reason to use relays instead of tubes. Tubes had a very short lifetime. One bad tube can ruin your day. Having to deal with 18,000 tubes is a nightmare.
ENIAC was a great team effort. However, Konrad Zuse not only built the first electronic computer, Z1, he did it alone at age of 28 without support by any university, company and government. Konrad Zuse was a true genius and he deserves the credit for building the first electronic computer.
Honors over the "first" of anything are usually controversial -- and it's only going to get worse. Historically, there have been many convergences of technological development. This makes sense, if you think about it. Inventors, developers, thinkers are all products of the state of the art at the time they are working. Robert Heinlein, in (I think) The Door into Summer put it something like, "When it time to railroad, people start railroading." That's obviously a little deterministic, but it still true.
Thus, you end up with situations like Bell and Elisha Grey both filing patents for the telephone (on the same day!), Newton and Leibniz simultaneously developing calculus, etc. -- and it continues to this day with controversies about who "invented" the T.V. or the digital computer.
Likely the issue for us is that we are a) closer to the situation, so the mists of time aren't obscuring our vision; and b) record keeping is better now (and we are more interconnected, globally). So, if anything, who deserves credit for future inventions may be even more obfusicated.