John Mauchly

1. John Mauchly ENIAC computer Aras Bilgen

2. 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 PhD • 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

3. 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 PhD in physics • Statistics and cryptography • Attempts to develop analog electronic instruments suitable for specific lines of research

4. 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

5. 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

6. 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

7. 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

8. 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

9. 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.

10. 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 the 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.

11. 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.

12. References • http://www.library.upenn.edu/exhibits/rbm/mauchly/jwmintro.html • http://www-gap.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/~history/Mathematicians/Mauchly.html • http://inventors.about.com/library/weekly/aa060298.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-virtual-museum.org/collection/people.php?taid=&id=1234639&lid=1