Eckert, J Presper, Jr.

▪ 1996

      U.S. engineer (b. April 9, 1919, Philadelphia, Pa.—d. June 3, 1995, Bryn Mawr, Pa.), was widely recognized with John W. Mauchly as the inventor of the first general-purpose electronic digital computer, the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer (ENIAC). In 1973 a patent lawsuit resulted in John V. Atanasoff's (q.v.) being legally recognized as the developer of the first electronic computer when a judge revoked Sperry Rand's patent on the ENIAC. Historians, however, continued to regard Eckert and Mauchly as the founding fathers of the computer because of the complexity and programmability inherent in ENIAC's design as opposed to Atanasoff's limited-function Atanasoff-Berry Computer (ABC). On the basis of correspondence and meetings between Mauchly and Atanasoff about the ABC, the judge ruled that key components of the ABC, which was designed in the late 1930s, had been incorporated into the ENIAC. Eckert was educated (B.S., 1941; M.S., 1943) at the Moore School of Electrical Engineering at the University of Pennsylvania. It was there in 1943 that he began work on an electronic digital computer for the U.S. government. The massive ENIAC, which weighed 30 tons and filled an entire room, used some 18,000 vacuum tubes, 70,000 resistors, and 10,000 capacitors. The machine could be programmed to perform different kinds of calculations at high speed and in December 1945 solved its first problem—calculations for the hydrogen bomb. After its official unveiling on Feb. 14, 1946, the ENIAC was used to prepare artillery-shell trajectory tables and perform other military and scientific calculations. Eckert and Mauchly founded their own company in 1946, and the two ushered in the modern age of computers with the introduction of the Binary Automatic Computer (BINAC), which stored information on magnetic tape rather than punched cards, and the Universal Automatic Computer (UNIVAC I), which was built for the U.S. Census Bureau and found widespread applications in commerce. Eckert, who received 87 patents, remained in executive positions as the Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corp. was acquired (1950) by Remington Rand and that firm, in turn, merged (1955) to form the Sperry Rand Corp. and later merged again to form Unisys Corp. Eckert retired from Unisys in 1989.

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