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What especially upset Mauchly and Eckert, who tried to patent many of the concepts behind both ENIAC and then EDVAC, was that the distribution of von Neuma
These patent disputes were the foreru
THE PUBLIC UNVEILING OF ENIAC
Even as the team at Pe
By then the war was over. There was no need to compute artillery trajectories, but ENIAC’s first task nevertheless involved weaponry. The secret assignment came from Los Alamos, the atomic weapons lab in New Mexico, where the Hungarian-born theoretical physicist Edward Teller had devised a proposal for a hydrogen bomb, dubbed “the Super,” in which a fission atomic device would be used to create a fusion reaction. To determine how this would work, the scientists needed to calculate what the force of the reactions would be at every ten-millionth of a second.
The nature of the problem was highly classified, but the mammoth equations were brought to Pe
Until such classified tasks were completed, ENIAC was kept under wraps. It was not shown to the public until February 15, 1946, when the Army and Pe
The men knew that the success of their demonstration was in the hands of these two women. Mauchly came by one Saturday with a bottle of apricot brandy to keep them fortified. “It was delicious,” Je
The night before the demonstration was Valentine’s Day, but despite their normally active social lives, Snyder and Je
Je
At the demonstration, ENIAC was able to spew out in fifteen seconds a set of missile trajectory calculations that would have taken human computers, even working with a Differential Analyzer, several weeks. It was all very dramatic. Mauchly and Eckert, like good i
The unveiling of ENIAC made the front page of the New York Times under the headline “Electronic Computer Flashes Answers, May Speed Engineering.” The story began, “One of the war’s top secrets, an amazing machine which applies electronic speeds for the first time to mathematical tasks hitherto too difficult and cumbersome for solution, was a