ENIAC
John Mauchly and Presper Eckert designed and built the first digital, electronic computer. The story of their three-year race to create the legendary ENIAC and their three-decade struggle to gain credit for it has never been told and is a compelling tale of brilliance and misfortune. Mauchly and Eckert met by chance in 1941 at the University of Pennsylvania's Moore School of Engineering. They soon developed a revolutionary vision: to use electricity as a means of computing - in other words, to make electricity "think." Ignored by their colleagues, in early 1943 they were fortuitously discovered and funded by the U.S. Army, itself in urgent need of a machine that could quickly calculate ballistic missile trajectories in wartime Europe and Africa. In the wake of their triumph, Mauchly and Eckert would be shadowed by personal tragedies and professional setbacks that are as absorbing as their invention is fascinating. They built the famous UNIVAC machine and formed the world's first computer company, only to be outflanked and outfinanced by IBM and other emerging competitors. They filed a patent on ENIAC and would spend the next twenty-five years defending their inventions against a host of claims. Based on original interviews with surviving participants and the first study of Mauchly's and Eckert's personal papers, ENIAC is a vital contribution to the history of technology.
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What Hacker News says
- Eniac was indeed impressive and an important milestone. I recommend the 1999 book "ENIAC - The triumphs and tragedies of the world's first computer" by Scott McCartney which is both interesting to read and very informative. Also the review of the book by the late Jean Bartik, one of the "computers" and thus an eyewitnmess, is very interesting: https://web.archive.org/web/20221101120020/https://www.amazo....
Though the article is very US focussed, keeping quiet that German engineer Konrad Zuse completed the Z3 in May 1941, five years before ENIAC, effectively creating the world's first working programmable and fully automatic digital computer. While ENIAC required days of manual cable patching to program, the Z3 was quickly programmed by a punched tape ("Lochstreifen"), and Zuse also has invented Plankalkül between 1942 and 1945, which is widely recognized as the world's first high-level programming language. The cooperation between Zuse and ETH Zurich eventually led to the first self-compiling compiler and eventually Algol 60 (see "The European Side of the Last Phase of the Development of ALGOL 60" by Peter Naur in ACM SIGPLAN "History of Programming Languages" from 1978). And there was also the British Colossus, which was also a "programmable computer" and successfully utilized vacuum tubes for code-breaking by early 1944.
- Somewhat related, I enjoyed reading the (1999) book ENIAC, the triumphs and tragedies of the world's first computer by Scott McCartney on that system.
- I found the book Eniac: The Triumphs and Tragedies of the World's First Computer by Scott McCartney a pretty good read:
- > von Neumann proposed a description for a computer architecture now known as the von Neumann architecture
Well, he actually described an already existing design by Eckert and Mauchly under his name and this paper was illegally disclosed. For the ones interested in this and other fascinating stories about ENIAC, here is a good book: https://www.amazon.com/Eniac-Triumphs-Tragedies-Worlds-Compu...; worth reading is also the review by Jean Bartik (here https://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-reviews/R3K2DSB6UE1X7H/re...) who was there and witnessed everything firsthand.
- Whenever the von Neumann EDVAC paper is mentioned, I feel it is rightful to point people to the book that gives proper backround to what we incorrectly call von Neumann architecture:
https://www.amazon.com/Eniac-Triumphs-Tragedies-Worlds-Compu...
- I guess you already have seen this article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_computing
Here some other interesting books and articles:
https://www.amazon.com/Eniac-Triumphs-Tragedies-Worlds-Compu...
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