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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.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.
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.
Looking back at ENIAC we can now say that the first version of Scorched Earth was born.
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This space for rent. Call 1-800-SIGADVT to place your ad.
The Manchester `Baby' was officially the `Small scale experimental computer', not the Mark 1. The Mark 1 was the second computer built at Manchester. It was based on the `Baby', but was a lot more sophisticated - the Mk 1 had a magnetic drum store, for example. Not file store, but for virtual memory. Yep, the first practical programmable electronic digital computer had something like virtual memory. More here: http://www.computer50.org/
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/
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.
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.
In 1998, it was even proven that his Z3 computer was Turing Complete.
Another good link is here