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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.
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.
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.
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.
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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/
On the other hand, while IBM's boxes could add and multiply, ENIAC could, according to Pres, solve differential equations. That doesn't settle anything, but it is an impressive step up.