J. Presper Eckert

John Presper Eckert, a computer pioneer, was born April 9, 1919 in Philadelphia and died June 3, 1995 in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania.

Together with John W. Mauchly he constructed the ENIAC, the first general-purpose electronic digital computer, from 1941-1945.

Both Eckert and Mauchly left the Moore School of Electrical Engineering at the University of Pennsylvania in March 1946 over a dispute involving assignations of claims on intellectual property developed at the University. In that year, the University of Pennsylvania adopted a new patent policy to protect the intellectual purity of the research it sponsored, which would have required Eckert and Mauchly to assign all their patents to the University had they stayed beyond March.

Eckert and Mauchly's agreement with the University of Pennsylvania was that Eckert and Mauchly retained the patent rights to the ENIAC but the University could license it to the government and non-profit organizations. The University wanted to change the agreement so that they would also have commercial rights to the patent.
Eckert and Mauchly started up the Electronic Control Company which built the Binary Automatic Computer (BINAC). One of the major advances of this machine, which was used from August 1950, was that data was stored on magnetic tape rather than on punched cards. Electronic Control Company soon became the Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation and it received an order from the National Bureau of Standards to build the Universal Automatic Computer (UNIVAC). In 1950, Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation ran into financial troubles and was acquired by Remington Rand Corporation. The UNIVAC I was finished in December 1950.

Eckert remained with Remington Rand and became an executive within the company. He continued with Remington Rand as it merged with the Burroughs Corporation to become Unisys in 1986. In 1989, Eckert retired from Unisys but continued to act as a consultant for the company. He died of leukemia in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania, USA.

Some computer historiansbelieved that the widely-adopted term von Neumann architecture should properly be known as the "Eckert Architecture," since the stored-program concept central to the von Neumann architecture had already been developed at the Moore School by the time von Neumann arrived on the scene in 1944-1945.

References

* ENIAC: The Triumphs and Tragedies of the World's First Computer, Scott McCartney, 1999, Walker and Company, ISBN 0-8027-1348-3
* From Dits to Bits... : A Personal History of the Electronic Computer, Herman Lukoff, 1979. Robotics Press, ISBN 89661-002-0

External links

*A Tribute to Dr. J. Presper Eckert Co-Inventor of ENIAC. 2000 Daniel F. McGrath, Jr.
*ENIAC museum at the University of Pennsylvania
*Q&A: A lost interview with ENIAC co-inventor J. Presper Eckert
*Interview with EckertTranscript of a video interview with Eckert by David Allison for the National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution on February 2, 1988. An in-depth, technical discussion on the ENIAC, including the thought process behind the design.