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."

Comments

ARRRR, MATEY!

[Omikr0n]

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

Bletchley Park

[Burb]

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.

A little bit too prideful, don't you think?

[Spy der Mann]

Someday I'll write a book on who really invented the computer. It wasn't Atanasoff or Von Neumann. We did it.

I really think that J. Presper Eckert (the ENIAC inventor ) and Von Neumann both deserve credit. Eckert said it himself in the interview:

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.

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.

First program run: direct knowledge

[192939495969798999]

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.

Eniac was a team effort

[christurkel]

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.

Re:Ahh, maybe not

[iamlucky13]

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.