John Mauchly ENIAC computer Aras Bilgen John William

John Mauchly ENIAC computer Aras Bilgen

John William Mauchly • Born on 30 August 1907 in Cincinnati, Ohio • Brought up in a scientist community due to his father's job • Undergraduate as EE in John Hopkins, then physics Ph. D • Married in 1930 • Started teaching physics in Ursinus College in 1940 • Went to Upenn to learn more about electronics • The mind behind the idea of a general purpose computer • Died January 9, 1980 in Ambler, Pennsylvania

Interests • Tennis, walk in the woods, Edgar Allan Poe stories • Used a jet propelled skateboard to demonstrate Newton's principles in the class • Keeps daily notes and even records his sleep • Felt that "engineering was mundane", and enrolled directly in Ph. D in physics • Statistics and cryptography • Attempts to develop analog electronic instruments suitable for specific lines of research

ENIAC: Definition • • • Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer Known as Project PX in the military circles 2. 5 meters high, 30. 5 meters wide, 0. 9 meter deep Weighs 30 tons 17, 468 electronic vacuum tubes, 70, 000 registers in thirty different units • Programmed by wiring these thirty units in sequence • 5, 000 additions and 300 multiplications per second

ENIAC: Importance • ENIAC is the first general purpose computing device • It laid the foundations for the modern electronic computing industry as we know it today • Demonstrated that high-speed, reliable digital computing was possible using the vacuum tubes • Integrated components to come up with an architecture to do general computing • Reliable computer that has less need to tend than its counterparts of the time

ENIAC: History • Built in Moore School of Engineering, Upenn – Started as an effort of Mauchly due to the fact that he does not have enough resources for his meteorological studies – Driven by his two year undergraduate experience, he took a summer course on electronics in Upenn and he is later appointed • 1942: first ideas of ENIAC – He envisioned a true general calculator, rather than just a trajectory table processor • April 1943: Project PX starts, Army supports with $500. 000 – However, due to his academic duties, he is titled only as a "consultant" to the project • February 14, 1946: ENIAC is announced publicly

Relevant people to ENIAC • John Presper Eckert – – Lab assistant in the summer electronics course Very close friends with him Implementer of the physical architecture and circuitry In other words, he made the machine • Lt. Herman Goldstine – The military contact for the project • John Atasanoff and Clifford Berry • John Von Neumann

The other two computer guys • Atasanoff and Berry – John Vincent Atasanoff, in Iowa State university, built an electronic computer with his grad student Clifford Berry – Summer 1941: Mauchly visits Atasanoff to look at the machine • This visit is similar to Steve Jobs' visit to PARC • They both saw that the things in their minds were doable – Atasanoff's ABC is a linear equation solver, still a specialized machine • Von Neumann – A mathematician from Princeton, who was interested in the EDVAC, the stored program version of ENIAC – First one to produce a report outlining the details of EDVAC, thus the first one to present the idea to the scientific world – His studies influenced the work at Los Alamos on nuclear weapons – Today, he is known as the father of the de facto architecture for computers

After ENIAC • 1946: Eckert and Mauchly left Upenn due to patent issues, and founded Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation • They started to work on BINAC, later UNIVAC, the next version of ENIAC – 2. 25 MHz, serial computation, strong input output, significantly faster than ENIAC – US Census Bureau bought the first machine, 45 produced later • Remington Rand bought the company in 1950 • He was not able to bring up his project as an independent product – It was a war project at the beginning – Remington Rand (now Unisys) was a corporate place, marketing and development teams took over • But he saw the need of consultancy for digital computing and founded Mauchly Associates in 1959.

Did he do it? • Did he do it? A question asked for any invention… • Back at that time, the inventors were attributed with the ideas • The implementation mattered, and theory was neglected • People thought that new ideas came from implementations, not previous ideas or theories • So, Mauchly was not attributed as the inventor, but had to share it with his colleague, Eckert.

Conclusion • Mauchly still remains one of the known inventors of ENIAC. • He primarily built the idea, and Eckert primarily built the machine. • They undoubtedly built upon others ideas, just the same was as their ideas were later built upon. • Mauchly also saw the application area of his computer, and pursued the opportunity by setting up a consultancy firm. • He was a successful inventor, for he knew to hold on to his idea and brought it to life.

References • http: //www. library. upenn. edu/exhibits/rbm/mauchly/jwmintro. html • http: //www-gap. dcs. stand. ac. uk/~history/Mathematicians/Mauchly. html • http: //inventors. about. com/library/weekly/aa 060298. htm • http: //www. wired. com/news/roadtrip/0, 2640, 61070 -2, 00. html • http: //en. wikipedia. org/wiki/ENIAC • http: //web. mit. edu/invent/iow/mauchly-eckert. html • http: //www. ieee-virtualmuseum. org/collection/people. php? taid=&id=1234639&lid=1