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…
Eckert-Mauchly Corporation was formed by the scientists John Eckert and John Mauchly in the early 40s, designing and building some of the first famous computers in existence. The company was incorporated December 22nd, 1947, originally called Electronic Control Corp. before being renamed. Although the two men built the ENIAC before…
Back in 1904, British scientist John Ambrose Fleming first showed his device to convert an alternating current signal into direct current. The “Fleming diode” was based on an effect that Thomas Edison had first discovered in 1880, and had not put to useful work at the time. This diode essentially…
Pioneered with the advent of the first transistor using semiconductor materials at Bell Labs by John Bardeen and Walter Brattain, semiconductors have had a monumental impact on our society. You find them at the heart of microprocessor chips as well as transistors. Anything that’s computerized or uses radio waves depends…
The first transistor was about half an inch high. That’s mammoth by today’s standards, when 7 million transistors can fit on a single computer chip. It was nevertheless an amazing piece of technology. It was built by Walter Brattain. Before Brattain started, John Bardeen told him that they would need…
The University of Pennsylvania inaugurated the ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator And Computer) on Feb 16th 1946. It is an electronic computer many times more complex than any previous. Eckert and Mauchly formulated the plans for the machine in 1943, and it runs its first trials in Nov 1945. It’s structure…
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…
COBOL (Common Business Oriented Language) was one of the earliest high-level programming languages. It was developed in 1959 by a group of computer professionals called the Short Range Commitee, a group formed by a Pentagon meeting to find a short range solution to a common business language. There were other…
Howard Aiken and Grace Hopper designed the MARK series of computers at Harvard University. The MARK series began with the Mark I in 1944. Imagine a giant roomful of noisy, clicking metal parts, 55 feet long and 8 feet high. The 5-ton device contained almost 760,000 separate pieces. It was…