J. Presper Eckert

inducted in the class of 2004

Notable accomplishments:

• Co-designed (with John Mauchly) ENIAC, the first general-purpose electronic digital computer (1945)
• Co-founded (with Mauchly) the Electronic Control Company (later renamed the Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation) (1946)
• Co-designed (with Mauchly) the EDVAC computer (1949)
• Co-designed (with Mauchly) the BINAC computer for Northrop Aircraft (1949)
• Co-designed (with Mauchly) the UNIVAC, the first general-purpose business applications computer (1951)

Quotes:
“One of the reasons we needed to take a greater risk, in my opinion, we wanted to try something different, and to justify it, it involved taking a risk. It also looked like we could accomplish what they were doing with less money overall. It turned out that it took more money than we originally hoped, but that wasn’t entirely our fault. We originally expected to build the machine with 5,000 tubes. As it turned out, we built it with over 18,000. But that isn’t because we mis-estimated how many tubes it took to do something; it’s because the government changed from wanting one function table to three. They changed from wanting ten accumulators to twenty. The original plan was just to use an accumulator by repetitive addition to do multiplication. We decided to build a separate multiplier to greatly speed up multiplication by fifty times or something. We decided to put a square-root divider, and decided to use punch card equipment on the input-output instead of teletype tape, which we originally were thinking of. We essentially built a much more versatile and elaborate device, and this shot the bill up three-and-a-half times or four times, about in proportion to the amount that it shot the machine up in size. ” (Interview about the ENIAC with the National Museum of American History, Feb. 2, 1988)

“We were calculating trajectory tables for the war effort. In those days, the trajectory tables were calculated by hundreds of people operating desk calculators — people who were called computers. So the machine that does that work was called a computer.” (1989 interview with family friend Alexander Randall V, published in ComputerWorld, Feb 14, 2006)

Suggested reading:
“ENIAC: The Triumphs and Tragedies of the World’s First Computer” by Scott McCartney (1999)

“ENIAC in Action” by Thomas Haigh, Mark Priestley, and Crispin Rope (2018)

Learn more:
Biography at IEEE Computer Society