ENIAC, the forgotten story

Scott McCartney's Eniac is a beautifully researched, immensely readable, and surprisingly poignant look at the two men who worked for three years in the frenzied atmosphere of World War II to successfully build Eniac, the world's first digital, electronic computer.

One of the most amazing things about their very overdue story is that most of us have never heard of either of them.

ENIAC: The Triumphs and Tragedies of The World's First Computer author Scott McCartney of the Wall Street Journal pages 262 publisher Walker rating 8/10 reviewer Jon Katz ISBN summary The forgotten men who built the world's first computer

Quiz:

Who invented the telephone?

The electric light bulb?

Launched the first manned flight?

We all know, of course. We've been schooled from the age of five to know. The creators of some of the greatest American technology are legends, household words, patriotic icons and shamans, their homes and labs turned into historic landmarks and museums.

But who built the first electronic computer?

A group of sixth-grade New Jersey students, asked that question earlier this year, divided their responses between Bill Gates and Steve Jobs. A nine-year-old Virginia student guessed, "Radio Shack."

The fact that most people - even on a website like this - have no idea of the answer is why Scott McCartney's "ENIAC: " "the Triumphs and Tragedies of the World's First Computer" is such a smart and timely book. Talk about prophets without honor.

Computing hit like the Big Bang. The International Data Corporation (IDC) estimates the amount of commerce conducted over the World Wide Web will top $1 trillion by 2003. Yet the Net's history is murky. The people who profit from modern computers are well known, but the people who actually developed them are forgotten.

Last week, as the Internet celebrated its 30th birthday, a scientist present at the UCLA lab (the first node of ARPAnet was installed at the UCLA Network Measurement Center, where a research group connected the IMP to their Sigma 7) where it was partially created told a reporter that nobody even bothered to take a picture.

Scott McCartney, a staff writer for the Wall Street Journal, decided to remedy that sad reality. His book tells the virtually unknown story of two scientists, the late John Mauchly and Presper Eckert, and their tenacious three-year struggle to build the legendary ENIAC in a secret workshop at the University of Pennsylvania. Mauchly and Eckert are rarely written about in computer anthologies and histories, not even mentioned in Stephen Segaller's otherwise thorough "Nerds 2.0.l, A Brief History Of The Internet" published last year. A plaque at the University of Pennsylvania commemorates the spot where ENIAC was put together, but doesn't even list the names of its inventors.

Mauchly and Eckert were obsessed with the idea of using electricity to make computing machines "think." Ridiculed and ignored by their colleagues, they found unlikely benefactors in the U.S. Army, desperate to find some way to calculate artillery shell trajectories as the Allies were getting chopped to bits attacking entrenched German positions in Italy and World War II.

Despite the fact we more or less know how it turns out, "ENIAC" is a scientific thriller, with McCartney skillfully and knowledgeably tracing the assembling of this unprecedented machine, with its countless vacuum tubes, cables and gears.

Although ENIAC was commissioned at the beginning of the War, Mauchly and Eckert didn't finish it until the fall of 1945, as peace descended. It had taken 200,000 man-hours of work and cost $486,804.22. What the Army got for its money was a thirty-ton monster that filled 1,800 square feet - the size of a three-bedroom apartment in many cities. What the rest of us got was modern computing, the Net and the World Wide Web.

ENIAC had forty different units, including twenty accumulators, arranged in the shape of a U, all connected by a ganglion of heavy black cable as thick as fire hose. It was 1,000 times faster than any numerical calculator, 500 times faster than any existing computing machine. In thirty seconds, ENIAC could calculate a trajectory, something that would require twenty hours with a desk calculator, or fifteen minutes on the machine then called the Differential Analyzer. Today's supercomputers, ENIAC's descendants, can perform the same task in three microseconds.

In the wrong hands, this would be a potentially Byzantine and impenetrable tale, but McCartney presents it with the perfect blend of skill, clarity, and most remarkably, humanity. He never forgets, or lets us readers forget, that like any story about technology, this is really a story about human beings. Mauchly and Eckert are well-drawn, fully developed characters in this powerful but ultimately sad, story.

Although the pair worked brilliantly together to build ENIAC, in the aftermath, their relationship, their work and their personal lives all suffered. Beset by back-stabbing, academic and legal intrigues, their own great naivete, and by financial and private setbacks, they were outflanked and financially outmaneuvered by other scientists, and by IBM and other emerging firms. Although they belatedly filed a patent on ENIAC, they spent much of the rest of their lives unsucessfully defending their invention against legions of claimants and competitors.

Worse, they have been almost universally forgotten by the astonishing subculture they made possible - at least, until now.

"ENIAC" is a not only a compelling and entertaining read, but offers the added satisfaction of helping right one of the more egregious oversights of the Information Age.

Purchase this book at Amazon.

Comments

The book has an essential flaw

[Anonymous Coward]

The book has at least one essential flaw. The first working, fully programmable general purpose computer was Konrad Zuse's Z3 (Germany, 1941). ENIAC (inspired by Atanasoff's earlier, less general designs) was fully programmable too, but came much later (in 1946).

Both Atanasoff (US-American of Bulgarian origin) and Zuse built limited calculators in the 1930s (e.g., 1935-38 Zuse completed the Z1, the first fully mechanical, programmable digital machine, and Atanasoff built electronic devices). But if we include mere calculators among "computers" then neither Zuse nor Atanasoff were first. Non-general purpose devices have been around for a long time (since the days of Leibniz and Pascal).

Z3's switches were based on relays instead of tubes like in ENIAC. This is no fundamental difference. There are many ways of implementing a switch. Today we use transistors, of course.

The Z3 was destructed in an air raid in 1944. It never got the publicity of ENIAC. Still, 1966 - 1995 Zuse finally received uncountable awards and world-wide appreciation as "Inventor of the Computer."