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John William Mauchly ( ; August 30, 1907 – January 8, 1980) was an American physicist who, along with J. Presper Eckert, designed ENIAC, the first general-purpose electronic digital computer, as well as EDVAC, BINAC and UNIVAC I, the first commercial computer made in the United States.
Together, Mauchly and Eckert started the first computer company, the Eckert–Mauchly Computer Corporation (EMCC), which allowed them to further the development of fundamental computer concepts originally conceived by members of the 1945-46 ENIAC programming team, notably Jean Bartik and Kay McNulty, including subroutines, nesting, and the first low-level assembler. They also popularized the concept of the stored program, which was formalized in John von Neumann's widely-read First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC (1945) and disseminated through the Moore School Lectures (1946). These publications influenced an explosion of computer development around the world in the late 1940s.
From 1932 to 1933, Mauchly served as a research assistant at Johns Hopkins University where he concentrated on calculating energy levels of the formaldehyde spectrum. Mauchly's teaching career truly began in 1933 at Ursinus College where he was appointed head of the physics department, where he was, in fact, the only staff member.
In the summer of 1941, Mauchly took a Defense Training Course for Electronics at the University of Pennsylvania Moore School of Electrical Engineering. There he met the lab instructor, J. Presper Eckert (1919–1995), with whom he would form a long-standing working partnership. Following the course, Mauchly was hired as an instructor of electrical engineering and in 1943, he was promoted to assistant professor of electrical engineering. Following the outbreak of World War II, the United States Army Ordnance Department contracted the Moore School to build an electronic computer which, as proposed by Mauchly and Eckert, would accelerate the recomputation of artillery firing tables.
In 1959, Mauchly left Sperry Rand and started Mauchly Associates, Inc. One of Mauchly Associates' notable achievements was the development of the Critical Path Method (CPM) which provided for automated construction scheduling. Mauchly also set up a consulting organization, Dynatrend, in 1967 and worked as a consultant to Sperry UNIVAC from 1973 until his death in 1980.
John Mauchly died on January 8, 1980, in Ambler, Pennsylvania, during heart surgery and following a long illness. His first wife, Mary Mauchly, a mathematician, whom he married on December 30, 1930, drowned in 1946. John and Mary Mauchly had two children, James (Jimmy) and Sidney. In 1948, Mauchly married Kathleen Kay McNulty (1921–2006), one of the six original ENIAC programmers; they had five children Sara (Sallie), Kathleen (Kathy), John, Virginia (Gini), and Eva.
Because of its high-speed calculations, ENIAC could solve problems that were previously unsolvable. It was roughly a thousand times faster than the existing technology. It could add 5,000 numbers or do 357 10-digit multiplications in one second.
ENIAC could be programmed to perform sequences and loops of addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, square-root, input/output functions, and conditional branches. Programming was initially accomplished with patch cords and switches, and reprogramming took days. It was redesigned in 1948 to allow the use of with some loss in speed.
In 2002, for his work on ENIAC he was inducted, posthumously, into the National Inventors Hall of Fame. National Inventors Hall of Fame
The term von Neumann architecture arose from von Neumann's paper First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC.Michael D. Godfrey, "Introduction to 'The First Draft Report on the EDVAC' by John von Neumann". . Dated June 30, 1945, it was an early written account of a general-purpose stored-program computing machine (the EDVAC). Goldstine, in a move that was to become controversial, removed any reference to Eckert or Mauchly and distributed the document to a number of von Neumann's associates across the country. The ideas became widely known within the very small world of computer designers.
Besides the lack of credit, Eckert and Mauchly suffered additional setbacks due to Goldstine's actions. The ENIAC patent , issued in 1964 was filed on June 26, 1947, and granted February 4, 1964, but the public disclosure of design details of EDVAC in the First Draft (which were also common to ENIAC) was later cited as one cause for the 1973 invalidation of the ENIAC patent.
The course "The Theory and Techniques for Design of Digital Computers", ran from July 8 to August 31, 1946. Eckert gave 11 of the lectures; Mauchly and Goldstine each delivered 6. "The Moore School Lectures", as they came to be known, were attended by representatives from the army, the navy, MIT, the National Bureau of Standards, Cambridge University, Columbia, Harvard, the Institute for Advanced Study, IBM, Bell Labs, Eastman Kodak, General Electric, and National Cash Register. A number of the attendees were to later go on to develop computers, such as Maurice Wilkes, of Cambridge, who built EDSAC.
Mauchly's interest lay in the application of computers, as well as to their architecture and organization. His experience with programming the ENIAC and its successors led him to create Short Code (see "The UNIVAC SHORT CODE"), the first programming language actually used on a computer (predated by Zuse's conceptual Plankalkul). It was a pseudocode interpreter for mathematical problems proposed in 1949 and ran on the UNIVAC I and II. Mauchly's belief in the importance of languages led him to hire Grace Murray Hopper to develop a compiler for the UNIVAC.
John Mauchly has also been credited for being the first one using the verb "to Computer program" in his 1942 paper on electronic computing, although in the context of ENIAC, not in its current meaning.
Critics note that while the court said that the ABC was the first electronic digital computer, it did not define the term computer. It had originally referred to a human computer, but was adapted to apply to a machine.
Critics of the court decision also note that there is, at a component level, nothing in common between the two machines. The ABC was binary; the ENIAC was decimal. The ABC used regenerative drum memory; The ENIAC used electronic . The ABC used its to implement a binary serial adder, while the ENIAC used tubes to implement a complete set of decimal operations. The ENIAC's general-purpose instruction set, together with the ability to automatically sequence through them, made it a general-purpose computer. However, the later EDVAC computer, developed without the immediate pressures of wartime projects, harked back more to the ABC in that it was a binary computer employing regenerative memory.
Proponents for the court decision emphasize that the testimony established that Mauchly definitely visited Atanasoff's lab at Iowa State College, had complete access to Atanasoff's machine and the documents describing it. Letters he wrote to Atanasoff show that he was at one time at least considering building on Atanasoff's approach.
Mauchly consistently maintained that it was the use of high-speed electronic flip-flops in cosmic-ray counting devices at Swarthmore College that gave him the idea for computing at electronic speeds.
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