Category Archives: People

John Mauchly grew up in Chevy Chase, Maryland. In 1927 he got a scholarship to the Johns Hopkins University, where he studied engineering but soon switched to physics, earning his first degree. In 1932 he earned a doctorate and taught physics at various colleges. Mauchly, who had been a physics professor at Ursinus College near Philadelphia before beginning work on ENIAC, often zipped around his classroom on a homemade, jet-propelled skateboard in order to demonstrate Newton’s laws of motion. By 1940 his interests were drawn toward building computers, and in 1941 he attended an electronics course taught by John Eckert at the Moore School of Electrical Engineering. Eckert shared his passion for computers, and they became close friends.

After a widely accepted report Mauchly wrote on computing, he and Eckert teamed together to build the ENIAC. He would later form the Eckert-Mauchly Corporation with Eckert and they built some of the most famous of the early computing machines.

After leaving Eckert-Mauchly in 1950, he formed Mauchly Associates and served as president from 1959 to 1965. He was awarded the Harry M. Goode Memorial Award in 1966. He received numerous other accolades and awards and ran two companies until his death in 1980.

J Presper Eckert Jr. attended the William Penn Carter School in Germanstown. In 1937, after graduating from school, he entered the Moore School of Electrical Engineering at the University of Pennsylvania from where he graduated in 1941. After graduation he was offered a teaching job at Moore, where he met John Mauchly. Mauchly had many ideas about the development of computers, and Eckert quickly became interested.

Later the two would collaborate on the ENIAC computer, one of the first computers of it’s kind in 1946. After it’s success, both left Moore and formed the Electric Control Company, and created the BINAC. Electric Control Company became Eckert-Mauchly in 1950 and continued to build some of the famous early computers. Eckert held patents on 85 inventions and numerous awards before his death in 1995.

Von Neumann’s interest in computers differed from that of his peers by his quickly perceiving the application of computers to applied mathematics for specific problems, rather than their mere application to the development of tables. During the war, von Neumann’s expertise in hydrodynamics, ballistics, meteorology, game theory, and statistics, was put to good use in several projects. This work led him to consider the use of mechanical devices for computation, and although the stories about von Neumann imply that his first computer encounter was with the ENIAC, in fact it was with Howard Aiken’s Harvard Mark I (ASCC) calculator. His correspondence in 1944 shows his interest with the work of not only Aiken but also the electromechanical relay computers of George Stibitz, and the work by Jan Schilt at the Watson Scientific Computing Laboratory at Columbia University.

By the latter years of World War II, von Neumann was playing the part of an executive management consultant, serving on several national committees, applying his amazing ability to rapidly see through problems to their solutions. Through this means he was also a conduit between groups of scientists who were otherwise shielded from each other by the requirements of secrecy. He brought together the needs of the Los Alamos National Laboratory (and the Manhattan Project) with the capabilities of firstly the engineers at the Moore School of Electrical Engineering who were building the ENIAC, and later his own work on building the IAS machine. Several “supercomputers” were built by National Laboratories as copies of his machine.

In the 1950’s von Neumann was employed as a consultant to IBM to review proposed and ongoing advanced technology projects. One day a week, von Neumann “held court” at 590 Madison Avenue, New York. On one of these occasions in 1954 he was confronted with the FORTRAN concept; John Backus remembered von Neumann being unimpressed and that he asked “why would you want more than machine language?” Frank Beckman, who was also present, recalled that von Neumann dismissed the whole development as “but an application of the idea of Turing’s `short code’.” Donald Gillies, one of von Neumann’s students at Princeton, and later a faculty member at the University of Illinois, recalled in the mid-1970’s that the graduates students were being “used” to hand assemble programs into binary for their early machine (probably the IAS machine). He took time out to build an assembler, but when von Neumann found out about it he was very angry, saying (paraphrased), “It is a waste of a valuable scientific computing instrument to use it to do clerical work.”

Grace Brewster Murray graduated from Vassar with a B.A. in mathematics in 1928 and worked under algebraist Oystein Ore at Yale for her M.A. (1930) and Ph.D. (1934). She married Vincent Foster Hopper, an educator, in 1930 and began teaching mathematics at Vassar in 1931. She had achieved the rank of associate professor in 1941 when she won a faculty fellowship for study at New York University’s Courant Institute for Mathematics. Hopper had come from a family with military traditions, thus it was not surprising to anyone when she resigned her Vassar post to join the Navy WAVES (Women Accepted for Voluntary Emergency Service) in December 1943.

She was commissioned a lieutenant in July 1944 and reported to the Bureau of Ordnance Computation Project at Harvard University, where she was the third person to join the research team of professor (and Naval Reserve lieutenant) Howard H. Aiken. She recalled that he greeted her with the words, “Where the hell have you been?” and pointed to his electromechanical Mark I computing machine, saying “Here, compute the coefficients of the arc tangent series by next Thursday.” Hopper plunged in and learned to program the machine, putting together a 500-page Manual of Operations for the Automatic Sequence-Controlled Calculator in which she outlined the fundamental operating principles of computing machines.

By the end of World War II in 1945, Hopper was working on the Mark II version of the machine, where she found the first bug, influenced the creation of COBOL with the first English-like language FLOW-MATIC, and had helped design one of the first electronic computers. Although her marriage was dissolved at this point, and though she had no children, she did not resume her maiden name. Hopper was appointed to the Harvard faculty as a research fellow, and in 1949 she joined the newly formed Eckert-Mauchly Corporation. Hopper never again held only one job at a time. She remained associated with Eckert-Mauchly and its successors (Remington-Rand, Sperry-Rand, and Univac) until her official “retirement” in 1971. Her work took her back and forth among institutions in the military, private industry, business, and academe. In December 1983 she was promoted to commodore in a ceremony at the White House. When the post of commodore was merged with that of rear admiral, two years later, she became Admiral Hopper.

She was one of the first software engineers and, indeed, one of the most incisive strategic “futurists” in the world of computing. Perhaps her best-known contribution to computing was the invention of the compiler, the intermediate program that translates English language instructions into the language of the target computer. She did this, she said, because she was lazy and hoped that “the programmer may return to being a mathematician.” Her work embodied or foreshadowed enormous numbers of developments that are now the bones of digital computing: subroutines, formula translation, relative addressing, the linking loader, code optimization, and even symbolic manipulation.. Throughout her life, it was her service to her country of which she was most proud. Appropriately, Admiral Hopper was buried with full Naval honors at Arlington National Cemetery on January 7, 1992.

Born in 1900, Howard Aiken was an influential pioneer in the world of computing. A graduate of the University of Wisconsin, he earned a doctorate from Harvard in 1939. While a graduate student he began plans to create a large computer. His first efforts working with IBM produced the ASCC computer, which was completed in 1943.

The machine was moved to Harvard University in May 1944, where it was renamed the Harvard Mark I. There he met Grace Hopper, who would later help him design the Harvard Mark II, one of the first completely electronic computers. After it’s completion in 1947, he worked on a series of computers there all the way to the Mark IV in 1952. Aiken thought only six electronic digital computers would be required to satisfy the computing needs of the U.S. He was given several awards for his contributions to computing.

John Atanasoff, a professor of mathematics and physics at Iowa State College, built an electronic binary computer that represents the first applications of electronics to automatic calculation. Despite never being fully operational, his ideas were major contributions to modern electronic computers. He was long familiar with the problems of solving complex linear equations, and in the 1930s began investigating the use of electronics to provide a device that would be faster and more efficient.

In 1937, Atanasoff devises the architecture and with the help of a colleague, Clifford Berry, completes a prototype in 1939. Known as the Atanasoff-Berry Computer (ABC), it has all of the fundamental elements of the modern electronic computer. John Mauchly would later learn of it and visit Atanasoff. The ABC never ran without an error, and he abandoned the project when he took on some war related work. He later won a court case in 1973 concluding he is the official inventor of the electronic computer, a title that actually belongs to more than one person or perhaps Konrad Zuse.

Born June 22, 1910, Berlin-Wilmersdorf, German scientist Konrad Zuse built the first of two electromechanical computers, the Z1 and Z2. A civil engineering student in 1934, he quickly saw the potential value of a machine that solved tedious algebra in minutes. He built them using binary, setting the use of the Base 2 numbering system for computing in stone. The German Experimental Aerodynamics Institute funded his subsequent work, but the original Z1 was destroyed in an Allied attack. Unfortunately, due to isolation caused by the war, his designs did not influence American and English computer development, where electronics was paving the way for real computing.

Eventually he fled with the Z3 to Zurich when he was unable to convince the Nazi party to continue financing his work, where he later developed the Z4. He formed a company of his own after the war, constructing and selling his designs. In addition to his computers he also invented a programming language called Plankalk.

Born June 23rd, 1912 in London, England, Turing displayed a penchant for math at an early age. He attended Kings College, Cambridge, and Princeton, where he earned a Ph.D. in mathematics. He published “On Computable Numbers” in 1936, which established the theoretical foundations of digital, stored-program computing. During WWII he worked for the British government cracking the German Enigma code and assisting in the construction of the Colossus, the first operational electronic computer.

Eccentric and colorful, he rode a bicycle everywhere (even when it rained) and often wore a gas mask to control hay fever. He was also a long distance runner and would’ve been a contender in the 1948 Olympics if it hadn’t been for a serious injury. After the war he turned his attention to artificial intelligence, inventing what is now called the Turing test, which was used to judge whether a machine was considered intelligent. He was also openly gay, which was looked upon with disdain at the time and earned him some serious prosecution. Turing went on to study the chemical and mathematical basis for the formation of asymmetrical patterns in biology. He was found dead on June 7th, 1954 at his home, victim of an apparent suicide.