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

by Scott McCartney

Presents a history of the world's first programmable computer, ENIAC, and its creators, a team funded by the U.S. Army and led by John Mauchly and Presper Eckert, and discusses their race to complete the computer and their struggle to take credit for their discovery. Reprint.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Science, Technology, Computers, Audiobook, Computer Science

262 pages, Mass Market Paperback

First published January 1, 1999

Reviews

[Charlene · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is great. What a fantastic idea to spend the whole focus of a book on the invention of Eniac. I loved every delicious minute of the invention process, court battles, politics, and personal battles surrounding the development of Eniac.

When I was very little, my father took me to UPenn to see Eniac. He worked there as a programmer in the late 1970s and took me into his office and explained what email was, at the time a foreign concept. He helped me type a message to one of his coworkers and I hit send! It took a lot of explaining on his part for me to understand that I sent a real letter to a real person, just like one the postal worker would deliver, and that I had done it in a fraction of a second. I was really young but understood it enough to be amazed. Email was a brand new phenomenon and could only be sent inside the building itself, but what a rush! I was taken in by the size of Eniac and by my father's words, spouting off the many incredible things it could do when no one else had anything like it-- and how it led to the progress they were making in computing at that point in the 70s. When I later studied cognitive science at UPenn, I went back to see it and remembered how amazed I was as a little girl. On the second time around I was even more captivated.

Reading about the politics at Penn was fascinating. I love the struggles that played out between Penn and its workers, the Army and the Navy, and IBM and other companies. It's crazy how often the little guy gets screwed. Money often determines the outcome. In addition to that, being an extrovert really helps... a lot. Programmers and scientists are often not very good at speaking up and asserting dominance. Poor Mauchly. I do not want to provide any spoilers, but the portrayal of his life, until his death, was my favorite part of the book.

So if I loved it so much, why 3 stars? The history enthusiast in me wanted to give it 5 stars. The human being in me who cares about basic rights and inequality wanted to give it one star. He allotted one sentence to Ada Lovelace, and it was unbelievably dismissive. When writing about the female computers, he seemed to think himself progressive for stating they were thought of as clerks but were in reality actual programmers. Gee thanks. When authors tell histories that leave out key females, they help to bury their worth even deeper. I am really tired of that. I cannot in good conscience give more than 3 stars to any author who does that, no matter how great the rest of the book was, and the rest of the book was truly great.

A main goal for this book, if not the main goal, was to right the wrongs that had been committed by excluding the significant contributions of the very people who made some of the most significant contributions. It is therefore all the more surprising that he would treat Ada Lovelace's contributions so dismissively. He did the very thing he argued against in this book

[John · Rating 3 out of 5]

An interesting read on the early history of the computer. The main flaw as I see it is that the story of ENIAC is largely outlined in the first third of the book. The rest of the slender tome goes on to detail the extended battles over patent rights. Plenty of print is spent on the creators' battles with themselves, the marketplace, and the powers that seemed to conspire to deny them their proper place in computing history well after ENIAC was retired. I have read only a little heretofore about the intellectual property battles detailed in the book. The author clearly has written the book to take up the cause of Mauchley and Eckert as not only the driving force behind ENIAC, but to laud them as the actual inventors of the modern electronic computer. I'm not inclined to argue - I was just more interested in the actual history and capabilities of the ENIAC itself, and apparently that wasn't worth the whole of the book. Even later, as the author and the inventors move on to found the "world's first computer company" and struggle to create the more powerful successor the UNIVAC, McCartney seems more interested in detailing Mauchley and Eckert's poor business decisions, deteriorating personal lives, and extended legal battles rather than expounding on what UNIVAC could do and how much better it was than ENIAC. Having said that, I did enjoy the book and found it quite interesting. I very much liked how the author detailed the various hurdles the ENIAC team faced and how they overcame them. I apreciated how he put the efforts to build the ENIAC into the context of the ebb and flow of the 2nd World War. The U.S. Army funded the development of ENIAC and it's demands, yoked to the innovative solutions of Mauchley and Eckert, created systems and architectures that literally launched the computer age.

[Dan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Eniac by Scott McCartney

When I was an undergrad in Electrical Engineering in Ann Arbor there was a large section of ENIAC that was on display in our EECS atrium. I was always fascinated by this enormously complicated morass of vacuum tubes. This book - published during the Y2K crisis - did a good job of laying out the history behind this machine.

The two visionaries that were the focus of this book were:

1. John Mauchley - Physics Professor at Penn
2. John Pres Eckert - Penn engineering student

In 1943 in the midst of the war, the Army gave $60k to Penn to develop a Electrical Numerical Integrator and Computer based on an idea of Mauchley's who was more interested in weather predictions.

Ostensibly this machine could help the military with their complicated ballistic calculations.

When completed in 1945 - two years later -the world's first electrical computer had over 17,000 vacuum tubes and required 174kW to operate. A power draw equivalent to that of a commercial radio station.

Now too late for war use, it was used exclusively for the next eight years on hydrogen bomb research.

The same team also built the Univac which was used to "call" the landslide 1952 presidential election results. It did this with a 4 electoral vote accuracy only hours after the polls closed. CBS was amazed and Remington Rand the company who designed it was now on the map. Rand was one of the only threats to IBM's dominance in the computation business.

The rest of the book goes on to discuss the patent rights battle for the first computer and the business battles that ensued between Remington Rand and IBM.

A good read but I would have liked to have seen a little more science and less on the legal battles however.

4 stars

[Jamie Smith · Rating 4 out of 5]

The story of Eniac is a remarkable tale of inspiration, genius, hard work, and triumph, followed by some rather sordid attempts by people on the periphery to claim credit for it. John Mauchley and Presper Eckert were two brilliant men thrown together by the exigencies of World War II and the Army’s pressing need for a fast way to calculate trajectory tables for artillery. Mauchley was a physicist who had been teaching at a liberal arts college and only had a job there because the school’s nursing program had a science requirement that he was qualified to teach. Eckert was a young electrical engineer who had applied for his first patent at age twenty-one.

Their proposal for an electronic computer was not well received. The Army already had a plan for an analog computer built by IBM and Harvard University that they were sure would meet their needs. However, the requirement for a device to make rapid calculations was so great they decided to take a chance on the Mauchley/Eckerd machine as a fallback to the other project, and let a contract to the University of Pennsylvania to build it.

Constructing it required solving one complex engineering problem after another. Most famously, they addressed the issue of the unreliability of vacuum tubes by running them at a fraction of their rated voltage, which significantly extended their lives. In its final incarnation after rebuilds in the 1950s Eniac had 20,000 vacuum tubes, and over 5,000,000 hand-soldered joins. It wasn’t ready by the end of World War II, but it was in continuous use after that until 1955, primarily working on calculations for nuclear weapons research.

Eniac’s competition is also a fascinating story. The IBM Harvard Mark 1 was an enormous analog computer, and a masterpiece of engineering in its own right. According to its Wikipedia entry it was fifty-one feet long, weighed 9445 pounds, and contained 765,000 components. Eniac was actually not much faster than the Mark 1, but both of them were enormously faster than the old method of working out ballistics problems by hand. Eniac could complete a calculation in thirty seconds that would take a human twenty hours.

Once Eniac was up and running it became clear that the future was in electronic computers, and its success led to attempts to steal credit for it. For instance, since the project was awarded to the University of Pennsylvania, they appointed a faculty member to be the nominal project manager. He did not believe in it, took no part in the engineering design or development, and hardly ever even appeared in the lab, but when Eniac was seen to be a great success he filed a patent naming himself as the inventor.

Even worse was the behavior of John von Neumann. He was one of the most brilliant minds of the twentieth century, a true genius by any measure, but his dealings with Eniac do no credit to his memory. Late in the development process Mauchley and Eckert showed him their plans for an improved version. He made some suggestions regarding programmability, then wrote a document that introduced scientists around the world to the potential for electronic computers. In it, however, his description of Mauchley and Eckert made them seem like mere technicians, and while he did not directly claim credit for the device, he left that impression. He also persuaded the Army to release his document unclassified, so it was widely read. When Mauchley and Eckert saw it they wrote a rebuttal with the actual facts, but even though their document was shorter than Von Neumann’s and had less technical information, theirs was classified and reached a much smaller audience. Von Neumann lived for twelve years after the war and had multiple opportunities to correct the misperception that he was responsible for Eniac, but never did.

After the success of Eniac Mauchley and Eckert started a company to build computers, but they were better engineers than businessmen, and it foundered. They went their separate ways and tried other ventures, but none were particularly successful and the latter parts of their careers were filled with disappointments.

Had it not been for the war there would have been no incentive, and no funding, to build an electronic computer. Analog devices had a track record and seemed to be a better prospect, so it is likely that years would have passed before it became clear that there was a better way to go. It is interesting to think how much farther behind we would be today without Eniac to show the way.

[Richard Thompson · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have read a number of books about the history of computers -- Babbage, Turing, Gates, Jobs and so on. I knew a bit about the work of Aitken at Harvard. And I had heard of Eniac and Univac, but knew zero about their history, and I had never heard of Eckert and Mauchly.

In most ways, this is just another pretty good book about science history, but I found it fascinating because it taught me about people I had never heard of who made very important contributions to a very important field. Lots of people had imagined computing machines, many had built machines that could add and do other simple arithmatic, but Eckert and Mauchly were really the first to put it all together into a device that actually worked that had all of the key elements of a modern general purpose computer. That's an awesome achievement.

The single most interesting thing in this book is the claim that the so-called Von Neuman architecture, which defines the basic structure of all moden computers was really invented by Eckert and Mauchly, but that Von Neuman was able to claim credit for it by some academic publishing sleight of hand. I haven't had one of my personal heroes take such a body blow since I learned about Hamilton's views on Thomas Jefferson.

The second most interesting thing was how the ineptitude of the admnistration at U. Penn. in dealing with patent policies for professors may have cost Philadelphia the leading position as the tech capital of the country. Instead Stanford, Harvard and MIT were able to claim the tech crown for their cities.

[Eric_W · Rating 5 out of 5]

I really enjoy reading books about the history of technology, and this
audio book was particularly fascinating. World War II created a demand
for lots of number crunching, especially for the development of artillery tables. Human computers — hence the origin of the word for the hardware we all use today — were women who had been math majors. They were recruited in droves to laboriously perform the intricate computations that governed the positioning of field pieces. The tables were all predicated on the environmental conditions in Texas, and unfortunately when they tried to use them in North Africa, they discovered the nature of the soil was so different that it affected the firing of the guns, and the tables were worthless.

Teachers and professors had been inducted by the thousands, so when two otherwise less than spectacular individuals presented themselves at the Moore School of Electrical Engineering at the University of Pennsylvania they were welcomed. J. Presper Eckert and John
Mauchly were very different kinds of individuals but they complemented each other nicely. Eckert had an engineer's desire for perfection and getting something to work, Mauchly was driven was a desire to find a device that would help him solve the intricate computations
needed to predict the weather. Mauchly had gotten his Ph.D. in the thirties, and his first job was teaching at Ursinus College where he enlisted his students to use elementary mechanical calculators to do the staggering numbers of calculations required to determine weather patterns. He began playing around with circuits and electronics, knowing there must be something better. He was intrigued by the work being done at Swarthmore College with vacuum tubes. These newfangled devices had the ability to turn off and on very quickly. They were
being used to count cosmic rays, so Mauchly wondered if they might have an application for his calculator. Could they be used to replace the pins in a mechanical device he wondered. They would be much faster. Eckert had been a tinkerer all his life, building assorted machines and electrical devices. He wanted to attend MIT, but his parents could see no value in a career in physics or engineering, so he was sent to the University of Pennsylvania to study business. He soon switched to the Moore School after becoming bored. He became bored easily and once fell asleep during a class taught by the dean. He created a little device
that he took to dances that would measure the intensity of a kiss by simply measuring the moisture on a couple’s hands. His first patent was for a mechanism to use light to record sound on motion picture film, and it worked much better than what was in current use, but it
never caught on.

The idea that electronics could be used to create a super-fast calculating machine was pooh-poohed by those trained in traditional principles of science, but the army, desperate for a assistance with their artillery tables was willing to try anything. RCA and the experts in vacuum tube technology had told them what they were doing was impossible. Reliability just wasn’t there. Soon Mauchly and Eckert had come up with a design that used some 18,000 vacuum tubes and required miles of wires to connect them all. Eckert discovered that if he ran the
tubes at 10% of the rated voltage, the tubes would last much longer with far fewer failures.

That was to be a significant realization, as they obviously could not be replacing vacuum tubes all the time. Eckert did lots of research. He was such a perfectionist that he did studies with starved mice to see if there were cables that the mice would not chew on or eat even when extremely hungry, and that was the only kind of cable he would permit in the machine. The machine took up a large room and generated a considerable amount of heat and used much energy. The project was not actually completed until just after the war, but it was an astonishing feat, the first time an electronic machine had been able to make decisions based on a calculation (it had if-then statements built in to it).

Once the machine was completed and working, it became obvious to many in the university that they had a potential goldmine, and other faculty, including the famous John Van Neumann, tried to claim credit for their work. The university administrators made a bad tactical error by insisting that all patents be turned over to the university, a break with tradition at the time, and this caused such hard feeling that both men left Penn just five weeks after the unveiling of the machine. The chance to become the computer/ technological capitol of the country — that Boston was to become — was lost for Philadelphia.

Also of interest is The Soul of a New Machine albeit very dated now.

[Des · Rating 2 out of 5]

“The Triumphs and Tragedies …” is a good qualifier for the title of this book.
Unfortunately I had hoped to read a more detailed history of the development of ENIAC and it’s significance and historical context.
The writing style was bland and the interest level diminished accordingly.
In my view good historical writing creates a narrative and brings together themes that explain and discuss the historical context and the related problems and issues.
This book fails in this regard. If it were designed as a textbook on the personal papers of the inventors, the detail of what was uncovered, and the aftermath it would have been good, but still quite dull and uninteresting.
There is considerable discussion of the business models and development following ENIAC’s invention. The book also examines John Mauchly and Presper Eckert's failure to secure a patent resulting from a 1973 court decision. I found this more interesting and better written than the highly significant technical achievement.
The book is more suitable as reference material not for recreational reading.
I’ve read much better.

[Bojan Tunguz · Rating 5 out of 5]

It is hard to imagine today, when there is literally a computer in each pocket in a form of a smartphone, that digital computers are a relatively recent development in the course of human history. They have more than anything else in the past fifty years changed the way we live and communicate with each other, the way we entertain ourselves, and have touched almost every aspect of our lives in ways that we have increasingly come to take for granted. And yet it is ironic that almost no one would be able to tell you who invented the computer. This is in a marked contrast with many other technological inventions that have changed the modern civilization. Almost any kid could tell you who invented the steam engine, the cotton gin, the automobile, the telephone, the airplane, the light bulb or the radio. For better or for worse, all of those inventions have particular name or two associated with them. Unfortunately, because of the series of historical misfortunes, the true inventors of the first functioning digital computer ENIAC are hardly household names. Presper Eckert and John Mauchly were the minds behind this WWII seminal effort, and even had the patent to the computer to their credit for a while, but due to a series of historic misfortunes and legal wrangling lost that piece of prestige.

This book goes a long way towards righting that wrong. It is well researched and replete with details of the effort that led to the construction of ENIAC, with many interesting and amusing anecdotes. It paints a very humane and sympathetic picture of Eckert and Mauchly, all with their characteristic human foibles and weaknesses. And yet, Scott McCartney is not entirely opposed to the fact that no single individual ultimately benefited from the invention of the computer. To him at least this was the reason why the huge advances in computer industry were possible in such a short span of time.

Ultimately, this is a very readable and enjoyable book, with a lot of important historical insight.

[Krishna Kumar · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is supposed to be the story of Presper Ekert and John Mauchly, the inventors of ENIAC, the first electronic computer. Actually, it is more about the politics and intrigue surrounding the invention and the various claims to fame by the people who were involved in the invention and the aftermath. The author is of the opinion that Ekert and Mauchly deserved more acclaim than they received, because others including John von Neumann received the credit because of their higher/better positions in the establishment.

It depends on what you are looking for in a book such as this. If you are mostly interested in the development of the technology, this book will be unsatisfying. It concentrates more on the personalities and the political games they played, instead of providing us with a deeper understanding of the invention and its challenges. I suppose that may be okay for many non-technical readers, but it was not for me.

[Pete · Rating 1 out of 5]

Took what should have been a compelling narrative and made it disjointed and uninteresting. I think the material is there for a better story teller to capitalize on.

[Hamish · Rating 4 out of 5]

Not especially well written. The introduction seemed a little condescending. The content is good though.

NOTES:

Pascall was the first teenage computer whiz. He was 19 when he built the Pascaline.

Vanavar Bush's Differential Analyzer was analogue.

Ekhert would starve mice and then put them in a box with a bunch of different types of wires. Whichever wire the mice chewed on the least was used in ENIAC. Thus mice-chewing damage could be avoided. This seems like a poignant illustration of some fundamental principle. "Bad luck just means you didn't do enough engineering" perhaps.

Von Neumann's role in early computing sheds some light on the mechanics of Stigler's Law of Eponymy - the law that famous discoveries and inventions are never named after their first discoverer or inventor. Eckert and Mauchly were busy actually building the first electronic programmable computers, and were also under military or academic (I forget which) obligations not to publish their results. Von Neumann dropped in during the development of EDVAC, and wrote an elegant sumary of the results so far (First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC). This ended up being widely circulated, and because von Neumann was already a person of interest, lots of ears pricked up.

So the architecture which was mostly devised by Eckert and Mauchly ended up being called "von Neumann architecture" because 1) von Neumann could communicate the results well, 2) von Neumann was well connected and had an audience, so most people heard of the architecture through him, 3) he wasn't in the weeds making the damn thing work, so could luxuriate in the more interesting aspects of the project, 4) he was a theoretician so could discern which ideas were fundamental and which were implementation details, 5) because this wasn't his baby, giving it away to the world for free was no skin off of his back, 6) he was still working on other projects and moving in other circles so could get the idea out there quickly, 7) as an outsider, he could see what aspects of the project were most interesting to an outsider.

Eckert and Mauchly were working on EDVAC - the successor to ENIAC - at the Moore School of Electrical Engineering, but left after the school demanded ownership of intellectual property. The duo set of to start their own company - the Eckert–Mauchly Computer Corporation (EMCC) - and began work on BINAC and UNIVAC (aka BINAC Pro).

BINAC had a speaker attached to the data bus to make noises as it ran. It also released a hard-boiled egg from its innards on command. However, it never really worked as a computer. Too many corners were cut in its construction. This led to the EMCC sinking, and ultimately being acquired by the Remington Rand Corporation. Remington Rand then merged into the Sperry Corporation, which thus inherited the ENIAC patent. Sperry entered into a patent-sharing agreement with IBM, which led the Honeywell Corporation, which was making its own computers, to challenge the patent in court. Sperry ultimately lost the patent, with Atanasoff being declared the true inventor of the electronic digital computer, although this may have had more to do with trust-busting than with who was the true inventor.

What exactly happened with Atanasoff and why he never seemed to get past the his original ABC machine is an intersting question and one which isn't entirely clear from this book.

Mauchly started Mauchly Associates and created a portable computer in a suitcase, long before the likes of compact computer corporation. However, because communication between computers was an open issue, there was no market.

> "The biggest surprise to me, was that development went so slowly" Mauchly said on computing "It seemed to me that it was an obvious direction, that it was laid out, and that a lot of people ought to have taken hold of this thing right away, and the development should have actually gone faster than it actually did."

Mauchly:
> I'm not a good salesman... I haven't seen how to sell some of my ideas. The selling of the original ENIAC to the army ordinance was a purely fortuitous thing based on the fact that there was a war going on. There was a need there and somehow I had gotten into the Moore School - the right place at the right time. It's a big game of chance. That time I happened to win. And the world happened to win.

If one were to narrativise the ENIAC history, it would be a tragedy centered on Mauchly. ENIAC was mostly his idea: he wanted a computer to predict the weather, and yet during its development he was prevented from giving it as much attention as he wanted due to teaching commitments and had to take a back seat. He eventually managed to put more time into ENIAC, but at the cost of a big salary cut.

After getting ENIAC off the ground, Mauchly and Eckert found that Von Neumann was getting all the credit for the invention, despite him only playing a quite minor role. They were then pushed out of academia by the Moore School demanding their intellectual property. Before launching their new venture, Mauchly finally took some time off to go on a holiday with his recent wife. During the trip she drowned at sea. The Eckert-Mauchly Corportation completely failed to monetise their invention, despite years of intense work. This wasn't too bad for Eckert who had married into money, but Mauchly ended up broke and almost lost his house.

After being forced into the humilitating position of having to sell their company, Eckert and Mauchly ended up being stripped of their patent of ENIAC, and Atanasoff was declared the "true" inventor of the electronic digital computer. Mauchly continued inventing but was never able to achieve the success he deserved. He died at 72, and missed out on being awarded the Medal of Honour with Eckhert.

A final humourous thought:

John Eckert and John Mauchly should be known as "the ENIAC Johns".

[Chris Esposo · Rating 3 out of 5]

A short, but concisely written (and convincingly evidenced) industrial/professional biography of ENIAC, and the team of Ecker & Mauchly, which brought it to existence during the second world war. Both Mauchly and Ecker were researchers/staff at the Moore School of Engineering at Penn during the early 1940s/late-30’s, which for a short while, in US technology history, sat at the center of science & technology innovation when Philadelphia was host to the nation’s most advanced electronics industry. This first electronics industry (which directly leads into the micro-electronics era 20 - 25 years later) was foundationed on radio and vacuum tube technologies.

It was this expertise in vacuum tube technology that inspired the creation of the first electronics computer since vacuum tubes, in series, can represent state (as well as hold state in memory) in the usual binary representation when linked to the heat or non-heating of a plate via application of voltage through the tube. The Ecker & Mauchly duo were originally commissioned by the War Department to build an electronic computer mostly for projectile calculations and executing/representing firing tables for armaments. However, was later appropriated to help with calculations for the Manhattan Project.

It is here that the duo intersect (apparently tragically) with John Von-Neumann, who worked with the team to develop a standardization/template for computers that have survived up to this day (circa 2021). This architecture, now referred to as the “Von-Neumann architecture” is shown to be erroneously labeled that as the attribution to it’s development solely to Von-Neumann is clearly false. This book provides compelling evidence to suggest that both the logic and memory components of the “Von-Neumann Architecture” was already prefigured or developed by Ecker & Mauchly independently, though Von-Neumann clearly had a significant hand in expanding on the development, as well defining a formal abstraction to represent the architecture and its components, which allowed the computer concept to be transferred to to any hardware implementation (as was the case a decade later with the advent of the integrated circuit and transistors).

There are some interesting take-aways from this book, not only from a technology standpoint, but also from a business one. Specifically, Ecker & Mauchly were ‘first-mover’ in the industry, however, it was ultimately IBM, a company that though much larger, was not more advanced technologically, which was able to seize the computing industry as the dominant monopologist for decades after this era, mostly through the backs of it’s impressive and massive sales organization. It is this part of the book that I found most interesting, as the era, by virtue of the distance of time, and the quickness of technology development, has become alien to most modern readers, though the lessons learned from the business dynamics of that era are still at work with contemporary firms today.

Overall, I liked the book, it wasn’t an exhaustive treatment of ENIAC or the first generation of computing, but it definitely provides a good primer on that era, from the vantage of Ecker & Macaulay, who’s contributions/work have definitely faded in the memory of even those in the computing field today. Recommended.

[Marsha · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book tells the story about John Mauchly and John Adman Presper Eckert, Jr. and how they built the first electronic, programmable computer.

Eckert and Mauchly were bought to the army by Lieutenant Herman Goldstine, a mathematician who was drafted in July 1942. The idea was pitched to convince the army that it was beneficial to work on developing their machine. The army agreed to give Eckert and Mauchly $61,700 for their first six months of work to develop what was to be called the “Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer (ENIAC).”

The men would work on the first floor of the Moore School Building, a former musical instrument factory at the University of Pennsylvania. Each would work on a specific piece of the machine as outlined by Mauchly and Eckert. They would work on the project at all hours of the day and seven days a week.

Mauchley wanted to use vacuum tubes as it has a cathode which gives off electrons when stimulated, but he knew that vacuum tubes could be unreliable because they burnt out easily. Eckert found the most reliable tubes from the telephone company and realized that if he reduced the voltage below what the tubes were designed for, this could help them to last longer.

Telephone workers were hired to help after their regular jobs to do the wiring inside the machine. A ventilation system was designed by an outside engineering company to draw off heat generated by the approximately 18,000 vacuum tubes ultimately added to the machine.

Six women were chosen to work on ENIAC, making them the first computer programmers. They were recruited from various colleges across the country. These six smart women were treated like clerks, but the women generally liked the challenges of working on ENIAC. ENIAC was difficult to program. The programmers had to make sure units were put together in the proper order to solve the problem given it. The units had program control circuits which would recognize an input signal telling it what to do. The process was so involved, however, preparing a program for ENIAC took a month or two, and setting up the program for the machine took a day or two. ENIAC was not an easy machine to use.

By the fall of 1945, soon after the war ended, ENIAC had proven that it was ready. The army had wanted the machine in assist in war efforts, but it had not been tested and completed in time. It cost the army $486,804.22 for its creation and filled 1,800 square feet of space, used massive amounts of electricity, but it was proven to be fast, doing calculation as fast as thirty seconds.

ENIAC was revealed to the public in February 1946. Then it was taken apart and moved to Aberdeen, Pennsylvania, where it was to be used for eight years. As atomic bombs were dropped on Japan to end the war, the army now had interest in developing a hydrogen bomb and decided it could use ENIAC to solve problems on how to do this. This task would be classified. It also was programmed to perform other calculations for other purposes before its retirement in 1955.

The book then describes the patent and litigation that followed, as well as development of the second computer, UNIVAC.

[Bob Lundquist · Rating 3 out of 5]

The first mechanical counters were probably our fingers and toes. Then fabricated tools came along such as the abacus and perhaps many others in the ancient world we will never know about. This situation changed little until the Enlightenment and the nineteenth century. As the population grew and the industrial revolution introduced large workforces, faster and more efficient methods were needed. In addition, there were other tools that did not make the cut and never became useful. It was not until the late nineteenth century that early versions of punch cards (an idea based on the Jacquard loom) were used to count large numbers such as the census of a country. With the twentieth century, electricity was used to control mechanical counters faster such as relays such as those used in the telephone industry. However, when it was realized that electricity itself could be used to count much faster than mechanical devices, it was off to the races to see who could put together a machine that could do this effectively. It was the invention of vacuum tubes that made this possible. The earliest use for vacuum tubes was for broadcast radio. It soon became obvious that other uses would be developed such as counting and manipulating large numbers.

This book tells the story of John Mauchly and Pres Eckert, tinkerers who met and designed and build the first electrical computer, the ENIAC. This was a long and drawn-out process that was not finished in time for its original purpose: calculating ballistic trajectories during World War II. The computer was huge, used tens of thousands of vacuum tubes and took up hundreds of square feet. However, like present-day computers, they could be programmed to perform large mathematical functions in a small fraction of the time it used to take. Unfortunately, they tried and failed to build a successful company based on their research. Many others came along to help and hinder the process. There were claims and counterclaims on who discovered what and who did what when and who got credit and patents for the work. About half the book is taken up with these issues. The technical aspects of the project are skimmed over with virtually no diagrams of how it was designed or how it worked in real life. It also would have been useful to know how Mauchly and Eckert may or may not have heard about solid state electronics and integrated circuits that were invented shortly after the ENIAC, what their reactions were, and how all this might have influenced the legal issues.

[Nathan Muschinske · Rating 4 out of 5]

Provides a good overview of the development of ENIAC, the lives of those involved and their varied success after development and the end of WWII. While von Neumann often is credited as the inventor of modern digital computer architecture due to wide dissemination of a draft article, Eckert and Mauchly actually designed and built it before the article was conceived.

In the end, the two inventors turned out to be poor businessmen, IBM soon overtook all other competitors leading to industry in the 1960s being termed “IBM and the Seven Dwarfs”. The final injustice was the invalidation of the computer patent which left the creators with practically nothing. No business success and no recognition for their lives’ work.

This book describes the darker sides to invention, the messy lives of those involved, grudges, and stretching the truth as to who truly made major contributions towards the first co,outer.

It demonstrates that no idea or invention is born in a vacuum and that it took many small contributions from dozens of people to arrive at the finished product. Another lesson learned: Don’t file just a single patent to make multiple broad claims with no references to prior art; it won’t end well. Better to make multiple filings on certain aspects so if one part/patent is invalided, it won’t invalidate all of your work in its entirety.

[Edward Champion · Rating 2 out of 5]

A disappointing book that tries to be too many things (technology history, overview of colorful personalities, feeble attempts to show ENIAC's impact on pop culture) in too few pages. This really needed the Kai Bird treatment. Because I don't think McCartney himself quite understands much of the underlying technological developments. (For example, he tells us that vacuum tubes are an improved version of the relay switch for binary values. And yet this is NOT how vacuum tubes were used on televisions. This gross oversimplification of a problematic component to a supercomputer really does nobody any favors here.) I had hoped that McCartney might have fleshed out the lives of the many women who worked on ENIAC, but they are merely superficial portraits -- as is his take on Hungarian mathematician John von Neumann. I was able to pick up a few new vital factual details, although I hungered for more. Computing history, as it turns out, is far more complicated than this woefully insufficient "tourist" approach.

[Bea Zee · Rating 5 out of 5]

As a recent convert into the world of programming and code, this book mesmorized me. As a recently made Philadelphian, the story hit even closer to home. Here I am getting into the tech world in the very city where the remarkable characters in this book came up with ingenious solutions that allowed for the building of groundbreaking inventions.

Theres more to it, however, as you will read about the politics and general bullshittery that goes into any entrepreneurial goal or dealings with big business, big government, or big personalities.

I personally finished the book feeling inspired. Van Gogh wasn't recognized in his lifetime, and the main players in this novel faced the same issue.

But the imagination, curiosity, determination and intelligence inspired me. Hopefully those that read this book will also be inspired and in that way the legacy of that exciting and tumultuous time and those genius, passionate men can carry on.

[Codepoetz · Rating 5 out of 5]

You probably know who invented the automobile and who invented the light bulb. But you probably don't know who invented the first electronic computer or the fascinating story behind why they aren't richer than God. Personally, I found it fascinating that the young engineers who created the first electronic computer had zero knowledge of Babbage/Ada's early work with analogue computing devices. [Note: Howard Aiken used Babbage's research during the construction of the Mark I at Harvard, but the Mark I was not an electronic computer so it did not evolve into the computers that we use today.] [Note: Henry Ford did not invent the automobile and Thomas Edison did not invent the light bulb.]

[Dan Cohen · Rating 3 out of 5]

A serviceable account of the origins and development of ENIAC and what happened to the key figures afterwards. Much of the book is taken up with the subsequent disputes about who should have received credit for what and I felt the author was heavily invested in certain positions (supporting Mauchly and Eckert) where I needed also to hear the other side of the argument. Frankly, it's difficult to come away from the book with a great deal of liking for any of the protagonists - I don't know if this is due to their shortcomings or to the writing. Certainly worth a read for anyone interested in the history of computing.

[Ryan · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is another narrow slice of computing history that serves as a great companion to 'The Dream Machine'. The book does a great job of detailing the origins of ENIAC and outline the significance of that computer's impact on society as a whole. I appreciated the effort the author took to tease apart who deserves credit (and for what). This is the second book in a row that goes into what an asshole John Von Neumann was. I would recommend this if you are already interested in computing history, though I don't think it will ultimately convert you if you aren't .

[Jaak Ennuste · Rating 3 out of 5]

Sometimes it's good to look back and instead of taking the computer as a black box -- you really become to understand how it works. The times, when every single digit was made of radio bulbs and all different directions of the developments were open.

This book is not very well written, sometimes not consistent, sometimes repeating itself. But the essence is there, you have to distill it by yourself.

[Bernardo · Rating 4 out of 5]

Easy to read book covering an amazing story with deep impact in our current digital world. A pity that people like Mauchly and Eckert, inventors of the first general purpose electronic computer, are not as well known in the industry and academy circles. They should be at the same level than Von Neuman, Turing, Pascal, Baggage and others.

[Kevin · Rating 2 out of 5]

Very interesting history of the ENIAC which I was not aware of. It went over the drama and business dealings that kickstarted the computer industry, but I was hoping it would go into more detail about the technological development.

[Blake Brashear · Rating 3 out of 5]

Decent overview about the first computers and the people that developed them.

[Ken Torbeck · Rating 2 out of 5]

Started out okay, but will put you to sleep after halfway point with things that really don't need to be in book.

[Edvinas Litvinas · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book was written by an eye contact person.

[Hind · Rating 3 out of 5]

Maybe I wasn’t listening close enough but I don’t think I got anything out of this book.

[Suzanne · Rating 5 out of 5]

A well-written story of the first computer, created during WW2. Research was paid for by the U.S. Army. Without this creation, we wouldn't have the small, compact computers of today.

[Eve Castille · Rating 5 out of 5]

Well researched, insightful, and entertaining even 25 years after being written.

[Paul Hartzog · Rating 4 out of 5]

I quite like books that purport to expose things that have been covered up or forgotten by history, and in particular, things that have happened unjustly. This book is great on both counts.

It's a quick read, only a few hours, and flows quite well.

Let's hope history comes to its senses and restores the proper credit and appreciation to Mauchly and Eckert.