John Maulchy and John Eckert

Yes, Mauchly and Eckert built a holistic thing called ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator And Computer) - the first valid electronic digital computer. On February 14, 1946, on Valentine's Day, a 30-ton giant with 18 thousand electronic tubes and 6 thousand switches was launched. According to legend, the lights of Philadelphia went out. The world welcomed the beginning of the computer era.

ENIAC was created on the basis of vacuum-tube technology, which provided an increase in speed, so necessary for scientists and mathematicians. Compared to the Mark-I computer, invented by Aiken at Harvard University two years earlier, it worked more than a thousand times faster. ENIAC could multiply in 2.8 ms, divide in 24 ms. Before ENIAC, it took about 20 hours for a qualified desktop calculator operator to get acceptable trajectory calculation results. The same calculation took 20 minutes on a differential analyzer, and the most complex ENIAC computer at that time could do this trajectory calculation in just 30 seconds.

ENIAC was awkward compared to later computers. To set the computer new commands, it was necessary to dial the code manually, just as the telephone operator connects the contacts on the switching field. However, the scientific world welcomed the two main creators of ENIAC - John Mauchly and John P. Eckert.

Much to their chagrin, Mauchly and Eckert will be forever connected with absurdity and controversy: who is John Eckert who actually invented the first computer. Since they worked for the military department and their research was classified, they could not tell anyone about their invention. Others, feeling less responsible for disclosing the secrets of the secret laboratory, told about the creation of the electronic brain.

Since childhood, Mauchly showed brilliant abilities. He knew how to handle electricity and was interested in computers. Born scientist August 30, 1907 in Cincinnati. He was nine when his family moved to Chevy Chase, Maryland near Washington, DC, where his father became head of the Terrestrial Electricity and Magnetism Department at the Carnegie Institute. At the age of five, John assembled a flashlight to play with a friend in the attic. When he was in elementary school, he installed electric door bells to earn pocket money. He invented a device that automatically turned off the light when his mother came in to check if he was sleeping.

In 1925, Mauchly entered the university in Baltimore, where he studied electronic engineering. In September 1927, after two years of college, he was awarded a master's degree for admission to the High School of Physics, which he had not completed. He worked as a computer in the bureau of standards. He always looked for ways to speed up calculations, to the extent possible, based on existing equipment. He was awarded a Ph.D. in physics in 1932. A year later, he became the head of the physics department at a college in Pennsylvania. In December 1930, Mauchly married Mary Welsley.

John Maulchy and John Eckert

Pursuing meteorology, in the hope of improving weather prediction, he wanted to prove that the Sun has a primary effect on climate. He proved it statistically: each flare on the Sun entails a certain climatic phenomenon that occurs after a certain number of days. Hiring a group of students, specialists in mathematics for fifty cents per hour, Mauchli used them to process data. He analyzed a huge amount of data to predict the weather and realized that a computer is needed. Mauchly represented the computer as the key to speeding up computing. Although vacuum tubes were unreliable, they could speed up the process compared to punching equipment and desk calculators.

Mauchly always used different approaches to solving the problem, choosing the fastest way to count. He invited graduates to the laboratory and began conducting experiments with neon lamps, purchasing a small batch from General, and he borrowed vacuum tubes from radio sets. The Mauchly schemes, developed between 1936 and 1940, included gas, neon, and vacuum tubes, which were then intended to be used in electronic digital computing.

On December 4, 1940, Mauchly became a student of John de Vayre and during the year hoped to be the first to invent an electronic computing device that would provide an answer immediately after entering all the necessary information for the calculation. The difficulty lay in the number system.

The result of all the experiments was the presentation of a report at a conference at the University of Pennsylvania. Immediately after the lecture, he met with John Atanasov. In June 1941, Mauchly went to Iowa to look at the Atanasoff car - ABC. Acquainted with the work of the machine, he was disappointed with Atanasov’s methods, the machine was not automated and every step was controlled by the operator. He hoped to see a more advanced and automated machine.

He noted that Atanasov did not use the main advantages of vacuum tubes, their speed and versatility. In addition, Atanasov did not know how to make vacuum tubes reliable. While Mauchly was in Iowa, he learned that he was accepted into Moore’s electrical school. A course was developed to train twenty specialists in mathematics and electronics. Here the paths of John Mauchly and John Presper Eckert crossed for the first time.

Like Mauchly, Eckert was a talented young man with an engineer thinking and willing to develop the most unusual devices. He was born in Philadelphia on April 9, 1919 in the family of a civil engineer. At eight years old, he assembled a detector radio. At twelve, Pre-Spur made a small boat that moved with the help of a magnetic field, and received first prize for it. At the age of fifteen, he developed a remote-controlled explosive device, which he experienced in school by pushing the button of the control unit in the audience.

By the time he graduated from school in 1937, Eckert had also completed the first course in the department of mathematics. Although he entered MIT and was allowed to continue his studies, Eckert's mother did not want to. His father wanted him to study at the Wharton School of Finance, at the University of Pennsylvania. Following the wishes of his parents, he transferred to Wharton, but he did not study there for long, because he did not like business classes. He wanted to study physics. Since the set ended, he went to Moore’s school, which he graduated in 1941.

He has always been an inventor. Over the course of one summer, he constructed a device that measured naphthalene vapor concentration using ultraviolet radiation. He later improved the circuit for voltage distribution. He then developed instruments that measure the allowable fatigue stress in metals. During the Second World War, he constructed a device for finding enemy magnetic sea mines. The device recorded the slightest change in the magnetic field.

He worked on the problems of radar, on the synchronization device measured by radar targets. In the summer of 1941, he studied electronics at Moore’s school and became friends with one of twenty students, John Mauchly. Eckert was twenty-two, he was younger than Mauchli by twelve years, but they did not attach any importance to this. While others thought that Mauchly’s plans were unrealistic, Eckert, on the contrary, was convinced that creating an electronic computer based on vacuum tubes was a completely solvable task.

As already noted, in June 1941, Mauchly visited John Atanasoff. In September, he wrote to Atanasov that he had concepts that “do not look like your car” and that he “wants to conduct research on various ideas with the hope of obtaining very fast results and not too expensive ones.” He asked Atanasov for permission to include some of the features of his computer into his. At the request of his second wife Kathleen Mauchly, he simply wanted to connect Atanasov to work together on a new computer. However, Atanasov’s response was negative.

In November 1942, the Allies landed in North Africa, and since the difference between North Africa and Maryland was significant, the tables of fire were incorrect. Therefore, the artillery department of the US Army received an order for new ballistic tables that required the computation of hundreds of trajectories: for each trajectory, six tables per day. Aberdeen scientists, experts in the field of ballistic research, worked together with Moore’s school to compile tables.

The differential analyzer, their best machine at the time, was not accurate enough, but only Eckert understood its futility. Mauchly was waiting for the moment to suggest that Moore’s school should design an electronic high-speed computer based on vacuum tubes.

Moore’s school was indifferent to his idea, but Eckert was on his side. It was a difficult time for Mauchly and Eckert, since it was necessary to convince others to invest in electronics, especially in electronic lamps. Opponents said that the lamps will quickly fail. The famous Enrico Fermi, a statistician and physicist, informed John von Neumann that with so many lamps ENIAC would work only five minutes.

But Mauchly and Eckert were not concerned about this. They knew that a computer would be a thousand times faster than any other device, and if it worked only five minutes per hour, it would be a hundred times faster than any other machine.

In August 1942, Mauchly compiled the project “Using high-speed devices on electron tubes for computing,” which convincingly showed that the use of electronic circuits will significantly increase the speed of calculations. The machine, which he conceived, performed a thousand multiplications per second, calculated the trajectories in one or two minutes, which is fifteen to thirty times faster than the analyzer. But the actual appearance of ENIAC occurred in September, when Aberdeen established contact with the university through his intermediary, Lieutenant Herman Goldstein. In March 1943, Goldstein asked Mauchly to express his ideas on electronic computing. When Goldstein suggested that Mauchly put down all his ideas on paper, he replied that it was already done. But, much to the chagrin of Mauchly, Dr. John Brainerd, the administrator of Moore’s school, the head of the ENIAC project, informed them about the missing note. Thanks to Mauchly’s secretary, Dorothy Chisla managed to recover the note from her verbatim records.

Some members of the government did not approve of these developments, because they thought that the computer was not technically feasible with existing technologies. Still, the project was approved on April 9, 1943, on Eckert's birthday, when he was 24 years old. The Artillery Department allocated $ 400,000 for the secret development of an electronic universal computer, the fastest, called an electronic numerical integrator (ENIAC). At first, it was given the name ENI, but later it was renamed ENIAC. The ENIAC development plan was classified and in Moore’s school was mentioned under the code name “Project PX”.

The largest electronic equipment known at the time, an electronic radar device, contained about 200 electron tubes, while ENIAC provided for approximately 17,000 lamps.

Fifty people worked continuously on the project with the exception of Mauchli, who also studied. The installation site was prosaically chosen; it was a rebuilt classroom at Moore’s school.

ENIAC did not use the binary system, simplifying the work of operators who read the results immediately, without converting from binary codes. The longest number processed by ENIAC contained twenty digits. In the main software device was laid information for all teams and transitions. The calculation program was not stored in memory with the data and could not be changed.

Few could forget the work habits of Eckert and Mauchly. Eckert liked to work outside the office in the presence of someone, and it didn’t matter whether it was a technician or a caretaker. He was a man of movement and seldom sat on a chair, and more often sat down on the edge of the table or walked back and forth. Mauchly was a great worker who could sometimes stay at work for several days without a break in sleep.

Mauchly and Eckert’s thoughts were occupied only by ENIAC, until at the end of April 1944 they felt on the threshold of success. Two adders processed the interaction data as well as the following information. Then Mauchly and Eckert formed the remaining eighteen adders. But it was already twenty months later, before the whole ENIAC first started working.

Already in December 1943, Mauchly and Eckert began to think about the design of an improved ENIAC, which would ensure that not only data but also commands are stored in memory. Their progress report, written the same month, included a proposal for another computer. A new idea took on a concrete form when, at the end of 1944, the Ballistic Research Laboratory agreed to the development of EDVAC (Electronic Discrete Variceble Automatic Computer). To ensure secrecy, this project was called “Project PY”.

The EDVAC project had a revolutionary impact on the entire course of further development of computer equipment. In January 1944, John Eckert first proposed the idea of ​​a stored program. From the standpoint of today, the principle of the stored program is considered the most important idea of ​​computer architecture and; according to some scientists, the only one that caused the second industrial revolution of the 20th century.

This idea is that, firstly, the program of calculations is entered into a computer and stored in the same memory as the original numbers, and secondly, the commands that make up the program are represented as a numeric code, do not differ in form from numbers and with them you can perform the same operations as with numbers.

The memory devices in the EDVAC computer by Eckert were first performed on mercury delay lines.

In the fall of 1944, when Mauchly and Eckert worked on a new computer, the military representative of the project Hermann Goldstein invited as a consultant John von Neumann, a brilliant mathematician, who was then involved in the secret Manhattan atomic bomb project. Neuman, having become acquainted with the work of the group of Mauchli and Eckert on the EDVAC project, perfectly understood what this computer is for scientific research. In June 1945, he prepared the report “Preliminary Report on the EDVAC Machine”, in which he described the main elements of the computer and the logic of its operation.

Goldstein, without consulting with the main authors of the project, Mauchly and Eckert, duplicated the report and sent it to many scientists in America and England. The report made a great impression in the scientific world, and since the name of Neumann was widely known, no one doubted its priority (until now the computer architecture based on the above provisions of the report is called Neumann).

Mauchly and Eckert, deprived of the opportunity, for reasons of secrecy, of publishing materials according to their invention, were deeply outraged by the actions of Goldstein, who provided this to a person who joined in their work only after a year. They understood that their invention would find a great use in human activity, and they feared that Neumann’s publication would prevent them from obtaining a patent.

So it happened. The Moore School Administration at the University of Pennsylvania insisted that members of the group waive their copyright to ENIAC and EDVAC. Mauchly and Eckert rejected the administration’s request and at the end of March 1946, a month and a half after the ceremonial launch of their first child, the ENIAC computer, left the university.

Since February 1946, ENIAC has been involved in solving problems of a secret nature related to the creation of a hydrogen bomb. The first task that existing computers solved in forty hours, ENIAC calculated in twenty seconds. Mauchly and Eckert opened a new era, and the proof of this was their 30-ton monster with 40 panels, 10,000 capacitors, 6000 switches and 18,000 vacuum tubes. 4000 neon light bulbs were on the front of the car, which recorded the status of various parts of the car.

Until 1947, ENIAC was in Moore's school, then he was transported to the landfill in Aberdeen. Used mainly to compile firing tables and create a new type of weapon, it was also used for aerodynamic calculations and weather prediction. He worked until October 22, 1955.

Rejecting the offer to open a computer lab at IBM, Mauchli and Eckert founded their own company in the spring of 1946, with a loan taken from Father Eckert.

Computer inventors went into business exclusively to develop an EDVAC type machine for the Federal Census Bureau. They have signed a contract with the government for the technical implementation of memory on magnetic tape and mercury delay lines.Although formally they no longer worked at the University of Pennsylvania, in the summer Mauchli and Eckert held a six-week seminar at Moore’s school “Theory and Methods of Designing Electronic Digital Computers”. This was the first real opportunity to give an idea to the audience regarding electronic computing. Lectures at Moore’s school were the most important of the events that took place at the dawn of the computer age.

At the end of the summer tragedy occurred in the family of John Mauchly. Resting on the coast in New Jersey, his wife Mary sank. Two years later, Mauchly married one of ENIAC's first programmers, Kathleen McNalt.

At the end of 1947, Mauchly and Eckert signed a contract with Northron Corporation in California to create a binary automatic computer - BINAC, which was supposed to be used in the development project of a long-range guided missile for the Air Force. It was also intended in the future to use it as an onboard computer.

But on-board computers became a reality only when miniature radio components were invented. BINAC was assembled in August 1949 with a budget overrun of $ 178,000, and with that, two inventors lost their independence. Absorbed in a project with the Census Bureau - the future of UNIVAC, Eckert and Mauchly paid little attention to BINAC. As a result, the machine — it was an electronic computer with a stored program (EDVAC was not completed until 1952) —was unstable.

Составленный из двух последовательных процессоров, BINAC функционировал, скорее, как два компьютера, обеспечивая дублирование вычислений. Каждая часть машины была сформирована как пара модулей, которые проверяли каждый шаг. Все команды выполнялись каждым модулем, а затем результаты сравнивались между модулями.

Если они были равны, следующая команда выполнялась, но если наблюдалось расхождение между двумя модулями, то процесс останавливался. Процессор был всего высотой 5 футов, длиной 4 фута и фут шириной, крошечный для тех дней. Каждый состоял из 700 ламп. В то время как ENIAC мог выполнять 5000 действий в секунду, BINAC делал только 3500, но последний компьютер мог делать 1000 умножений в секунду, в три раза больше чем ENIAC (333). С большой памятью каждый из двух BINAC-процессоров мог сохранять 512 команд.

BINAC для Маучли и Эккерта был ступенькой к UNIVAC, изобретатели верили в коммерческий потенциал компьютеров, и компьютер, который они сделали, имел большой спрос: сорок шесть экземпляров были проданы. Заказчики покупали компьютеры, даже если они стоили сотни тысяч долларов. Все остальные фирмы, среди них — IBM, были вынуждены простаивать и лишь наблюдать за успехом UNIVACЭккерта и Маучли. До конца 1949 года фирма Эккерта и Маучли испытывала финансовые затруднения.

Ударом явилась смерть главного инвестора фирмы, Генри Страуса, державшего 40 процентов пакета акций в “Эккерт-Маучли” — он погиб в авиационной катастрофе. Находясь на грани банкротства, Эккерт и Маучли приняли первое приемлемое предложение от Remington Rand. Два изобретателя получили 70 000 долларов за патенты плюс гарантируемое жалование 18 000 долларов в год в течение следующих восьми лет. Remington Rand завершил UNIVAC и поставил его в Бюро переписи 14 июля 1951 года.

UNIVAC был самым быстродействующим компьютером, созданным к тому времени (1951 год). Это была единственная в мире коммерческая электронная вычислительная машина общего назначения. Его “изюминка” — память с хранимой программой, а программируемые команды записывались на магнитную ленту. Одна бобина с магнитной лентой могла хранить один миллион знаков, раньше для такого количества требовались десятки тысяч перфокарт. UNIVAC содержал только 5000 электронных ламп (по сравнению с 17 468 лампами ENIAC) и был более компактен, чем предшественники. Основной процессор занимал пространство 14,5×7,5×9 футов. В то время как ENIAC работал с частотой 100 000 Гц, у UNIVAC она была 2,5 млн. импульсов в секунду. UNIVAC не требовал большого количества времени для загрузки. Информация считывалась с магнитной ленты. В отличие от двадцати 10-разрядных слов ENIAC, UNIVAC имел во внутренней, быстродействующей, доступной памяти 1000 слов.

В 1963 году, после более чем 73 500 часов работы, коммерческий отдел фирмыRemington Rand “отправил” UNIVAC в отставку. Сегодня части этой машины можно увидеть в Смитсоновском институте.

После UNIVAC Маучли и Эккерт создали компьютер LARC, первую машину, в которой были заложены идеи мультипрограммирования и мультипро-цессирования. В то же время Эккерт занял пост вице-президента в “Sperry Corporation”. Он жил в Глодвине со своей женой, Юдит Энн Револьт, и двумя из своих четырех детей.

Джон Маучли работал директором в “Univac-Division” до 1959 года, а затем организовал фирму “Mauchly Associetes” по разработке компьютерной техники, а в 1968 году создал сеть консалтинговых компаний с названием “Dynatrend”.

В 1974 году Маучли серьезно заболел (наверное, причиной болезни было несправедливое решение судьи Ларсона, вынесенное 19 октября 1973 года, в котором подвергался сомнению приоритет Маучли и Эккерта и, соответственно, патентные права “Sperry Corp.”) и до конца жизни так не смог поправиться. Он умер в январе 1980 года, пережив свою жену Кэтлин Мак-Нальти. У него было 2 сына и 5 дочерей.

Professor Mauchly was a member of many societies, including the American Physical Society and the Franklin Institute. He won many awards, including the Howard Potts Medal of the Franklin Institute (1949), the John Scott Prize (1961). In 1973, Mauchly, together with Eckert, was awarded the Philadelphia Prize “Man of the Year”. John Eckert in 1964 at the University of Pennsylvania awarded the honorary doctorate in computer engineering. In 1969, he was awarded the highest state award for achievements in the development of science, mathematics and technology - the Medal for achievements in science (National Medal ofScience). He is a member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, a member of the National Academy of Technical Sciences, he is the author and co-author of 87 patents.Mauchly and Eckert wrote down a monumental page in the history of computer technology.