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ENIAC 1996: Celebrating the birth of modern computing

By Peter C. Patton

In 1776 a group of patriots met in a tavern at Fourth and Walnut Streets in Philadelphia to plan a revolution that changed the world. In 1942 a group of Penn electrical engineering faculty and graduate students met at Linton's Restaurant at Thirty-third and Chestnut Streets to discuss the feasibility of electronic digital computing. On St. Valentine's Day, 1946 they demonstrated the first working electronic digital computer--starting a technological revolution as profound as the political one nearly two centuries before. In 1996 Penn and Philadelphia will mark the 50th anniversary of this event--the birth of modern computing--with 18 months of programs and celebrations.

Forerunners

There had been earlier attempts to build machines that did computing. Charles Babbage had designed a general-purpose mechanical digital computer in the 1700s, and his colleague Countess Ada Lovelace had proposed means for "programming" it, much as a Jacquard loom is controlled to create woven patterns. Mechanical analog computing had been developed by Vannevar Bush at MIT in the 1930s. In 1939 Howard Aiken, a mathematics professor, had built an electromechanical digital computer, the Harvard-IBM Sequence Controlled Calculator, designed to compute tables of mathematical functions like sines, cosines, and Bessel functions. Such machines relied on moving mechanical parts to perform calculations, limiting the potential compactness, speed, and reliability of these devices.

The electronic revolution

At the University of Pennsylvania, Professor John Mauchly and his graduate student J. Presper Eckert had already built equipment to perform numerical differentiation electronically rather than mechani- cally like the machines at MIT. Drawing on their experience using electronic vacuum tube circuits as computing devices, they proposed to the U.S. Army Ordnance Corps the development of an electronic numerical integrator and calculator (ENIAC) for the production of artillery firing tables.

ENIAC introduced almost every fundamental hardware concept of modern computing; with the exception of internally stored instructions

The project was funded by the United States Army at the University's Moore School of Electrical Engineering in 1942. The machine was designed and built in fewer than three years but was not finished until after the war was over. ENIAC was announced to the public in The New York Times on February 14, 1946. This event marked the beginning of the digital revolution in electronics and the birth of modern computing.

At about the same time that Mauchly and Eckert were inventing the requisite technology and designing the ENIAC at Penn, Professor John Atanasoff and his graduate student Clyde Berry at Iowa State University were building an electromechanical rotary dynamic storage register in which one could add a number to another number previously "stored" as electrostatic charges. Although not a computer in any useful sense, the Berry-Atansanoff device was considered "prior art" by a Federal court years later when deciding the eligibility of Eckert and Mauchly's invention for patent protection.

ENIAC introduced almost every fundamental hardware concept of modern computing, with the exception of internally stored instructions. The concept of storing the program in the same memory unit as the data was introduced by the Institute for Advanced Studies (IAS) computer, built at Princeton a few years later. Until ENIAC was first programmed to do an actual computation, computers were envisioned only as generators of mathematical tables. Problems were solved analytically, and the solutions determined in terms of functions that had to be looked up in precomputed tables for each value of a variable.

According to Nick Metropolis of Los Alamos National Laboratory, the first problem ever solved on an electronic computer was programmed by Enrico Fermi and Edward Teller for the ENIAC. It was the simulation of a nuclear blast, and its success led the Federal government to support a nascent computing technology, which soon became a new industry. It also led to using the rapidly developing matrix or numeri-cal analysis, first developed for mechanical desk calculators, to solve an entire problem on the computer itself. Today we take this notion for granted, but it was resisted by some computing pioneers.

The inventors of the ENIAC left Penn to form the Eckert-Mauchly Corporation, which later became UNIVAC, now UNISYS. Herman Goldstine, the Army officer that funded the ENIAC development at Penn, left the service after the war and joined John von Neumann at the Institute for Advanced Study, where they built the IAS machine and introduced stored- program computing. Later Goldstine went to IBM, where the IAS design was implemented commercially as the IBM 701, IBM's first electronic digital computer.

Honoring the pioneers

Although not a member of the original ENIAC team, Dr. Hopper was an early employee of the Eckert-Mauchly corporation, where she developed the first compilers (programs that translate problem-oriented statements into machine-oriented code). She had served earlier as the Navy's member of Harvard's Mark I development team. Dr. Hopper's pioneering notions of automatic programming were not welcomed at the Harvard Computation Laboratory but were recognized by Eckert and Mauchly, who realized that if electronic digital computation were to be commercially successful, a breakthrough was needed in computer programming. After pioneering two research compilers, Dr. Hopper's group developed MATH- MATIC, a programming language for coding mathematical problems, and FLOW-MATIC, a language for coding business data processing problems. The ideas Dr. Hopper developed in these languages found application in similar ones from IBM, called FORTRAN (FORmula TRANslator) and "Commercial Translator." Dr. Hopper left UNIVAC to lead the Navy's effort to standardize a common business-oriented language called COBOL. She retired from the Navy as its first woman admiral.

John Mauchly left UNIVAC to set up a world-wide consulting practice devoted to pioneering computing applications. J. Presper Eckert has retired from UNIVAC but is still active in his seventies and is internationally known as a consultant in computer architecture and integrated circuit design technology.

Herman Goldstine, retired from IBM, returned to Philadelphia as the executive director of the American Philosophical Society. He is an active participant in Penn's planning for the 50th anniversary celebration.

F. Gordon Smith, retired executive (from both IBM and UNIVAC) and past executive director of the Association for Computing Machinery-- himself a programming pioneer--is inviting other distinguished contributors to the field to play a part in the commemorative events.

The celebrations

As a part of the International Year of Computing, Penn plans a variety of academic events on campus. For example, SEAS professor David Farber is working with faculty in the Annenberg School of Communication to develop a conference on commerce in cyberspace. Professor Jerry Wind and his colleagues at the Wharton School plan a series of activities examining the impact of computing on business. In addition, faculty across campus are exploring the creation of a new institute--tentatively called the Virtual University--to provide a focal point on campus for the introduction of new educational technologies. Other Penn events will include computing-related exhibitions at Van Pelt Library, the Department of Music, and the Institute of Contemporary Art.

Numerous Philadelphia-area institutions, such as the Franklin Institute science museum and the Philadelphia Museum of Art, will mount special events in connection with the anniversary. Planned publications range from special issues of the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers' Annals of Computing to a series of lead articles in Computerworld magazine.

In league with the new Pennsylvania Convention Center, Penn will work to attract computing-related meetings to Philadelphia. The University, through Information Systems and Computing, has already volunteered to host the 1996 meeting of EDUCOM (an association of colleges and universities applying information technology in higher education), and the Association for Computing Machinery will begin its own 50th-year celebration with a meeting at the Convention Center in February 1996.

Penn's Development Office and SEAS are working with QED Productions in Pittsburgh to raise funds for a public television series on the social impact of computing. A recent WGBH series, "The Machine That Changed The World," focused on the early history of computing. The Penn-QED series will explore how the ubiquitous personal computer and other "smart" technologies are changing economic, social, and political conditions worldwide.

For more information, and to find out how you can participate in the ENIAC 50th anniversary celebrations, contact:

Stephen Brown
Assistant Dean, External Partnerships
School of Engineering and Applied Science
University of Pennsylvania
123 Towne Building
Philadelphia, PA 19104-6314
stbrown@ENIAC.SEAS