Eniac: The Triumphs and Tragedies of the World's First Computer

McCartney, Scott. Eniac: The Triumphs and Tragedies of the World's First Computer. 1999. 262p. ISBN 9780802713483. Available at 004.1 MCC on the library shelves.

The dawn of the Information Age can be rightly placed during the Second World War when two individuals, John Mauchly and Presper Eckert, one a physics professor, the other an electrical engineer, got together and proposed a novel way to perform high speed calculations by counting binary signals from electrically powered vacuum tubes. This general purpose computer was the first digital device and exponentially increased the number of calculations that could be processed in any given time frame.

Initially interested in the weather, Mauchly pursued a digital computing device to help him crunch reams of weather data. However, as there were no markets for such a machine, he and Eckert, whom he had met at the University of Pennsylvania's Moore School of Engineering, approached the Army, which was always trying to calculate artillery firing and trajectories tables due to the high demands from the military conflict and offered their revolutionary design. Prior to ENIAC, no calculation were done purely electrically.

Over the course of three years, their small team of engineers developed rat-proofed wiring, soldered over 5 million links, used more than 18,000 vacuum tubes, and built a giant computer weighing over 30 tons. The first device capable of executing if / then calculations, ENIAC came too late for the Second World War, but heralded in the atomic age by providing the calculations for the hydrogen bomb.

The story of ENIAC’s development is well coupled with the personal tragedies of both Mauchly and Eckert, who became computer pioneers, but who ultimately failed to capitalize on their inventions, and who spent the better part of the following thirty years defending themselves against claims by others that they had merely stolen their designs.

McCartney’s book provides a fascinating look into the origins of computers and the cut-throat world of technological advances.