Memorial Tributes Volume 10 (2002) / Chapter Skim
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J. Presper Eckert
J. Presper Eckert
Pages 70-75
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From page 71... ...
His charge was to teach the principles of engineering to students from other fields with the goal of making them able to work effectively in the World War II effort. His class comprised more than thirty students, sixteen of whom had their Ph.D.s.
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Together, they invented a digital differential analyzer, which was an electronic version of the mechanical Bush machine. Because it inefficiently counted pulses sequentially, they decided to build a machine that would use some sort of coded binary decimal system.
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Initial efforts were spent in learning how to extend their lives by reducing plate voltages and filament currents. Other memory ideas, such as recording magnetically on disks, were contemplated, but military urgency dictated that there could be no distraction from using vacuum tubes.
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to internal programming. The UNIVAC, the first digital machine to be produced commercially in the United States, was delivered in 1951 to the United States Census Bureau.
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The presiding judge ruled in favor of Honeywell's claim that John Mauchly's ideas for electronic devices were obtained from meetings with John Vincent Atanasoff during a visit to Iowa in 1941. In an interview in 1981, Eckert stated that he and Mauchly had invented the computer "in the same sense that Eclison invented the lightbulb." He said, "there were people who thought of the idea and tried to build one, but it didn't work very well." In 1964 }.
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