Human history contains any number of devices used for computation. For the purposes of this history, we will begin the first mechanical computational device invented several hundred years ago by Blaise Pascal. Pascal, who was also the co-inventor of the idea of Calculus, invented a mechanical calculator in order to assist his merchant father calculate sales taxes imposed by the French Crown. Later, another member of the mathematical pantheon, Gottfried Leibniz, improved on Pascal's idea by inventing a more general-purpose mechanical calculator that could perform multiplication and division. Pascal's and Leibnez's work were used in mechanical calculating devices into the second half of the 20^th century.

The 19^th century saw several interesting devices produced. First came another Frenchman, Joseph Jocquard, who was a weaver of cloth. Jocquard cleverly automated a loom by writing programs as series' of holes in sequences of wooden roofing tiles. In one program, the tiles were fastened together to make a loop. On the loom, wooden rods acted as controls. As the tiles in a loop were passed through the loom, the rods fell into the holes of the tiles and activated attached functions of the loom. This was the first known example of a programmable machine. For the first time it was possible to produce exact copies of cloth patterns and allowed the French to dominate the cloth industry.

Second came an English engineer Charles Babbage and Englishwoman Ada Countess of Lovelace. Babbage produced several successful mechanical computing devices, which earned the backing of the British Government for a more ambitious plan that he called the "difference engine". Babbage's "engine" was to be a programmable calculating device, but proved to be beyond the capacity of its designer to build and the British government to finance. Ada, a dabbler in the occult and mathematics, provided the way that the "engine" was to be programmed. (In the late 20^th century, computer controlled manufacturing techniques were able to produce enough parts of Babbage's engine to prove that his theories were sound. Ada is remembered through a programming language by the same name.)

Late in the 19^th century, an American, Herman Hollerith, combined punched cards with electromechanical tabulators to aid the United States Census Bureau meet its congressionally established deadlines. His company later became International Business Machines, better known as IBM. (IBM is today a major player in the computer industry and one of the largest companies in the world.) Early in the 20th century, large business adopted punched card tabulating equipment for keeping track of inventories and financial record keeping. Even the gambling industry adapted electromechanical devices for calculating odds and payoffs at racetracks.

Various electromechanical calculating devices were produced in the first four decades of the 20^th century. These machines were dedicated to taking the tedium and human error out of complex calculations. Just prior to the Second World War, Howard Aiken at Harvard, with IBM funding, produced the most successful of these devices. Called the Mark I, this electromechanical behemoth was dedicated to scientific calculations. Weighing five tons, consisting of over 750,000 moving parts and slow by the standards of modern calculators, the Mark I was programmed by feeding punched paper tape into the machine, which could then run for days without operator attention. Alas, the Mark 1 had no means of making decisions. It could only perform the calculations fed into it and could not react to data or the results of the calculations. While there were plans for successors to this giant, World War II intervened.

A very interesting machine in the running for first modern computer was Atanosoff-Berry Computer, or ABC, was created in the late 1930s at Iowa State University by John V. Atanosoff and Cliff Berry. In was partly electronic and partly electro-mechanical. Tubes were use, but for amplification only. Capacitors were used to hold charges representing values. Had it been completed, it might very well have qualified as the first modern computer.

During the Second World War, the British code breaking unit code named Ultra was responsible for attempting to decode the messages of the German armed forces and High Command. The messages of the armed forces were encoded and decoded by pairs of machines called Enigma, which produced a supposedly random seeming conversions to text which would supposedly take many years to decode if intercepted. The messages of the High Command were encoded and decoded by pairs of even more diabolical devices created to use a heavily modified form of standard Teletype terminal language.

The famous mathematician Alan Turing joined the code breaking efforts of Ultra. Turing produced a mechanical device that went by the appellation "Bomb" that automated the process of discarding incorrect solutions to intercepted Enigma messages. This greatly aided the work of Ultra and contributed to many military successes of the Allies. A British Telecomm engineer, Anthony Flowers, known as Tony, devised an extremely fast electronic version of the Bomb, which became known as Colossus.

To insure knowledge that the fact that the Enigma and High Command codes had been broken would remain a secret from the Germans, decoded information was only used if the Germans would likely attribute it to some other source or leak. This contributed to many Allied losses in the war and was one of the chief reasons that the work of Ultra was kept secret for some 30 years after the war. This secrecy was to have a profound impact on the British postwar computer industry and on Alan Turing in particular.

During and after the war, Alan Turing produced war what can only be called one of the most remarkable outpourings of modern computer theory in just a few brief years. Unfortunately, his vital role in the war was not widely known. A shy and retiring man who's stammer made public appearances painful, he committed suicide shortly after being publicly revealed to be a homosexual.

Many people today still argue over what was the first modern computer. Just a decade ago, the ABC found many adherents, bolstered by a court decision in the 1960s on the validity of certain computer patents. While there are those that still argue this view, most in computer science have come to accept that the ABC was never completed and thus could not be demonstrated to be a modern computer. The Mark I is still occasionally put forward as the first modern computer and those in the United Kingdom have been heard to loudly support the Colossus.

These disagreements generally come about over which definition of the work computer is being used. In the first part of the 20^th century, a computer was a person or device that computed - what we would call today a calculator. The Mark I calculated. It was programmable to the extent that it could be configured to calculate a specific problem or formula. The Colossus was a special purpose machine, incapable of diversifying to other types of problems. Today, the generally accepted definition of a computer includes the stipulation that it be a general-purpose machine. That is, a modern computer is a machine that can be so programmed as to be turned to any purpose, be it calculation, controlling a graphical device or monitoring the performance of an automobile engine. It is for this reason, and the very public legacy left by its building, that the choice of most in computer science for the first modern computer is the ENIAC.

Perhaps the single most important machine in the history of computing was built during the Second World War as part of the war effort. This machine, called ENIAC for Electronic Numerical Integrator and Calculator, was the very first electronic, digital, general-purpose computer. That it was built at all is remarkable. That it was built in less than three years, that it worked, that it became the basis for the greatest technological revolution in the history of humanity is nothing short of astounding.

The story of the ENIAC is very much the story of two men, John Mauchly and Presper Eckert.

John Mauchly was born in 1908. A restless intellect as a child, he alternated between voracious reading and electrical experiments. In school, he was known as a mathematics "whiz". Graduating from high school in 1925, his near perfect marks earned him a scholarship to Johns Hopkins University in Engineering. Bored by the end of his sophomore year, Mauchly switched to Physics in search of a more challenging curriculum. There in the Physics department, he used a mechanical calculating machine for the first time. By 1932, Mauchly was married with several children and the proud holder of a brand new Ph.D. in Physics.

With the Great Depression in full force, positions for new Physics Ph.Ds. were few and far between. In 1933, John Mauchly accepted a position teaching basic physics courses to aspiring pre-med. students and teachers at Ursinus College in Collegeville, Pennsylvania, where he became a liked and respected, if somewhat rumpled, professor known for an imaginative and innovative teaching style.

Teaching non-majors could scarcely have taken all of Mauchly's energy, so it is understandable that he began working on his own project, predicting the weather. Since even learning how to predict the weather requires performing large numbers of calculations during short time spans, it was only natural that he began searching for a better means of performing calculations than the primitive mechanical calculators that were within his budget. Realizing that using tubes as simple on / off switches might lead to a new way to count, Mauchly enrolled in an electronics night course and began to experiment with building an electronic calculator. During these last years before the entry of the United States into the war, Mauchly visited many people and places involved in developing calculating and other devices. These included the IBM electric cryptographic machine (which use vacuum tubes to send coded messages), Stibitz's work with relays at Bell Laboratories and John V. Atanasoff's never finished work on a digital calculator at the University of Iowa. These experiences and his own work left Mauchly convinced that the only way to build a reliable and fast calculating device was with tubes and that the machine must be digital. In the summer of 1941, John Mauchly enrolled in a course on electronics sponsored by the War Department. The oldest student in the class, Mauchly found himself in the position having to take instruction from the youngest Lab Instructor in the University of Pennsylvania's Moore School of Electrical Engineering, Presper Eckert.

Born James Presper Eckert in 1920, Pres, as he was known to his friends, was the son of a wealthy Philadelphia businessman. In his youth, Pres Eckert traveled the world with his parents, meeting movie stars and presidents. Philadelphia had become the center of the new electronics industry and Eckert reveled in it while still in high school. At one point, he was hired to create a sound system for a mortuary that wanted to cover the sounds of the gas burners in the crematorium. Eckert would later put his experiences in radio and sound systems to use when, in 1940, he applied for his first patent on an improved way to record sound on film.

Leaving high school, Pres Eckert scored second in the nation on the math portion of the College Board exams. With this evidence in hand, Eckert wanted to enroll in Physics at MIT. His father, however, wanted a businessman and his mother wanted him at home, so he enrolled at the Warton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania. Quickly bored with his classes, he attempted to switch to the Physics Department, but found there were no openings. Determined not to go back to the Warton School, Eckert enrolled in the Moore School of Engineering at the University of Pennsylvania in 1937.

This turned out to be a fortuitous choice as the engineers at the University of Pennsylvania were soon called upon to devise and improve electronic devices for the armed forces. Driven by nature to build rather than experiment, Eckert found that Engineering suited him. He quickly established himself as an innovative engineer, although a somewhat lackadaisical student. At a time when most of the dirty work was done on the roof of the Moore School under a hot summer sun, Eckert was easy to spot in his monogrammed white shirts and black tie - put out each day by his mother.

Eckert's biggest contribution during this time came in RADAR. The accuracy of RADAR depends on being able to determine to hundredths of a second the time elapsed between the origin of the electromagnetic pulse till its return. Eckert's work brought RADAR to that degree of accuracy and, incidentally, was to later provide the basis for the electronic memory of the ENIAC. In the summer of 1941, one of his duties included teaching the lab for an electronics course the Department of War was sponsoring. Given his intense desire to solve problems in order to build new things, it is perhaps not so surprising that the sheltered 21 year old genius should strike up a friendship with a student 12 years his senior who held a Ph.D. Mauchly presented just the right problem when he happened to ask after class one evening if Pres though it was possible to build an electronic digital calculator.

The first fruit of the collaboration between John Mauchly and Presper Eckert was to devise a way to replace all the mechanical parts of the Difference Analyzer (the standard mechanical calculator of the day) with electronic parts. Though this plan was never followed through, it did help to convince the younger Eckert of Mauchly's assertion that analog circuitry could never be as reliable and accurate as digital.

With many of the Moore School's faculty already being called up to work with and in the military, temporary faculty had to be added. Holding a doctorate, John Mauchly was offered a position for the duration. Again a tireless teacher, he taught more than a full load of classes. Mauchly's impulsive personality and his quick embrace of then radical ideas in electronics clashed with the Moore School's staid and conservative approach. This left him with little regard among his fellow faculty. They tended to look down upon him as an odd sort of fellow from a little regarded school. This attitude later extended to the ENIAC project, much to the regret of the University in later years. During this period Mauchly began to experiment with gas filled tubes (like those used in early televisions) in counting circuits.

In August of 1942, Mauchly published a paper called "The Use of High-Speed Vacuum Tube Devices for Calculations". For all practical purposes, it roughed out a design of an electronic digital computer. When he proposed that the school fund research into building such a machine, Mauchly's reputation was further eroded within the faculty. They regarded it as just another pipe dream from a notorious dreamer. After all, weren't MIT, Harvard, and Bell Labs working on improved analog calculating devices?

In 1943, a civilian scientist in uniform named (Lt.) Herman Goldstine was working in balistics research. The war had created an unprecedented demand for long-range guns. These guns in turn demanded pre-calculated firing solutions to be used effectively. Goldstine learned of Mauchly's proposal in passing and, curious, sought him out. Soon, with Eckert and Mauchly in tow, Goldstine was able to get the Army to fund the ENIAC project with the hope of producing a machine fast enough to calculate these tables. Project PX, as it was called in the parlance of the Army, was started with an initial funding of under $100,000. Project PX had Lt. Goldstine nominally in charge, a 23-year-old graduate student as chief designer and engineer and a 35-year-old dreamer as the visionary "old man".

Eckert and Mauchly quickly set out the first design of the ENIAC (then called the ENI). It was to consist of math units, memory units, panels for setting constants, and control unit to synchronize the whole. (This is essentially the architecture of computers today.) Punched cards would be used to input new data sets. Although the ENIAC was to be digital, it was also to be a base 10 machine rather than a binary computer.

The initial ENIAC team consisted of about a dozen people, including the two inventors and Lt. Goldstine. A back room in the Moore School was somewhat grudgingly lent for their work.

Although the relationship between Charles Babbage's machine and Ada Lovelace's programming concepts was unknown to them, the team would later add human computers. These were women, actually, that the Army had been employing to calculate the very gun firing tables that ENIAC was to produce, but by hand with the aide mechanical calculators. Their job would be to devise and oversee the procedures necessary to program the ENIAC.

At this point, Pres Eckert became the star and ringmaster of the show. While Mauchly's genius was in ideas, Eckert's was definitely in the doing. For the next year and a half, Eckert slept little and what little sleep he got was often in the lab. The lab quickly became known as the "whistle factory" after the sound that thousands of tubes emanated when powered. Eckert was literally inventing new types of circuitry as they worked, solving problems and revising old designs to mate with the new sections as ENIAC began to take form. This was complicated by the fact that once the ability of the inventors and their team to actually build the ENIAC was shown, the Army frequently revised the design, adding greater demands. The machine that was supposed to take about 5,000 vacuum tubes grew to require over 17,000. Incredibly, somewhere in this time, Eckert found time to get married!

It was not until 1944 that Mauchly was released from teaching by the Moore School to work full time on the project. For this privilege, his salary was reduced from $5,800 a year to $3,900. (To make up for the lost income, Mauchly took a job for one day per week at the Naval Ordinance Laboratory under his old acquaintance, John V. Atanasoff.) Although not an engineering genius, Mauchly's presence at the project was regarded as a steadying, even calming influence on the ever active and volatile Eckert.

In February of 1944, the final blueprints and circuit diagrams for the ENIAC had been finished. The design phase was complete and all that remained was to finish building the machine. Goldstine proved himself to be a master at convincing ever pressed wartime manufacturers and suppliers to provide the components necessary to complete the project. In June of 1944, just after the beginning of the Allied invasion to liberate Europe, the first units of the ENIAC were successfully tested.

Two things happened in 1944 that would serve to obscure the origins of the ENAIC. First, in the summer of 1944, Goldstine met the renowned mathematician, John von Neumann. Working on the Manhattan Project, von Neumann was instantly interested in a machine that could perform difficult calculations. Using his prestige, von Neumann quickly made himself a regular visitor and consultant on Project PX. Occasionally helping to solve remaining problems, he would go on to produce work in computer theory, improved designs for computers and later built a computer called the EDVAC.

The other thing that happened to obscure the origins of the ENIAC was more direct. Grist Brainerd, head of the Moore School, attempted to take control of the project that he had initially opposed. Figuring that the first to publish would get the credit, Brainerd attempted to write an internal report on the progress of the project. Instead he was forced by his fellow academics to co-author the report with Eckert and Mauchly, Eckert supplying the actual technical information about the ENIAC.

As any researcher would, Eckert and Mauchly wanted to publish their work. However, since the ENAIC was being built under wartime conditions, Norman Goldstine was obliged to become Lt. Goldstine and forbid it. Later, von Neumann would author an internal report on the ENIAC. Goldstine actually assembled the report from von Neumann's writings, which were often prepared in-between von Neumann's other activities. For reasons unknown, Goldstine affixed von Neumann's name to the report and then, disregarding his own ruling about publication on the project, sent copies to all major researchers in the electronics and mathematics field in the United States. Since this report was meant for use for those involved in the project, Eckert and Mauchly had not been concerned with attribution of ideas. Everyone on the project knew where the ideas had come from. Unfortunately, this report circulated as a scientific paper. This later writings by von Neumann contributed to the idea that von Neumann was a key player in the invention of the computer. To von Neumann's discredit, he failed to take any of the many opportunities given to him later in life to significantly acknowledge the work of either Eckert or Mauchly.

About this time, another persistent myth about the ENIAC was started. The ENIAC was tested by scientists that worked on the Manhattan Project to build the first atomic weapons that ended the war with Japan. This has lead to the notion that the ENAIC was used to build the atomic bomb during WWII. In fact, the ENIAC did not participate in WWII at all. It was not finished in time. Later, the ENIAC would be used by Edward Teller's research team to improve (if that is the right term) atomic weapons. The truth is that men and women working with pencil, paper, and mechanical calculators released the awful furry of the atom upon the world.

With great fanfare, on February 14, 1946, ENIAC was at last revealed to the world. ENIAC took 200,000 man (and woman) hours to build and cost $486,804.27. Weighing in at 30 tons, the 40 units of the ENIAC contained 17,468 vacuum tubes, 50,000 solders, 70,000 resistors, and 10,000 capacitors. It took up 1,800 square feet of space and used 174 kilowatts of power to operate. In fact, it took $650.00 worth of electricity every hour just to keep the components warmed up, ready for use. It took 30 seconds to do one of the trajectory calculations for which it had been commissioned, a feat that can be duplicated in nanoseconds on a typical PC.

Chafing at the machinations of those in charge of the ENIAC project for the Army and academia, Pres Eckert and John Mauchly quit the Moore School and started their own company. Started with a loan co-signed by Eckert's father, the Eckert and Mauchly Computer Company became the first private computer company and produced an improved computer called UNIVAC. Like the ENIAC, it too was very large, expensive, and made of thousands of vacuum tubes. Initially, there were no buyers for the UNIVAC. Computers were virtually unknown outside of academia, but there was a large potential client waiting. The U.S. Census Bureau was in a bind.

Mandated by law to be completed every ten years, the results of the census are used to decide voting districts and to allocate representation in government. The previous census had barely been completed in time using punch card tabulating machinery and, due to the huge post war growth of the population, the Census Bureau was facing the prospect of not being able to complete the new census within the allotted time. When the abilities of the UNIVAC to process information were explained, the Bureau of the Census became the first paying customer for the Eckert and Mauchly Computer Company.

At about the same time as the sale of a UNIVAC to the U.S. Census, a change in insurance laws required the Prudential Insurance Company to re-compute its actuarial tables. This could have required Prudential to hire hundreds, even thousands of new calculating clerks, which could have severely affected the financial health of the company. Eckert and Mauchly's machine was an attractive alternative and Prudential soon placed an order for a UNIVAC.

While Eckert and Mauchly were clever inventors and excellent engineers, they were not good businessmen. Employee's salaries and the costs of developing new technologies such as magnetic memory and magnetic tape storage soon ate through their capital, driving the young company deeply into debt. In the nick of time, Harry Strauss, a manufacturer of betting equipment, purchased a 40% interest in the Eckert and Mauchly Computer Company, which put it on the road to solvency. At its height, the Eckert and Mauchly Computer Company employed over 100 people. Unfortunately, events were to abruptly end this brief era of prosperity.

In fact, the worlds first computer company was soon to be forced out of business - not by a competitor, but by a political movement. McCarthyism, a political movement named after its leader Senator Joseph McCarthy, was looking for communists in government and private life. Unfortunately for the fledgling company, John Mauchly had briefly belonged to a scientific organization that, unknown to him, had a communist affiliation. During World War II, the Soviet Union was an ally of the United States. Many scientific organizations developed ties with the Soviet Union during this time with the blessing and encouragement of the U.S. government. The beginning of the Cold War just a few years later was a reversal of wartime loyalties. The Cold War was an era where direct military confrontation between the East and the West was barely avoided on a number of occasions. Not all of the public, private, and governmental reactions to the stresses of this time were logical. One ugly manifestation of McCarthyism was the practice of blacklisting people suspected of being communists or communist sympathizers. The inventors of the ENIAC, who developed it with Army funding and with the highest level of security clearances, found that they were under suspicion of being communist sympathizers.

For Eckert and Mauchly, blacklisting meant their security clearances were pulled without explanation, which meant that they could not do business with some areas of the government. This also meant that many private customers were warned away from the fledgling company and stopped inquiring or canceled existing orders for the UNIVAC for fear of reprisal or loss of government contracts.

With Harry Strauss's backing, the Eckert and Mauchly Computer Company likely would have weathered this storm, but Strauss's backing would vanish as quickly as it had come. The final blow to the hopes of the two inventors came when Strauss was killed in an airplane crash. With Strauss gone, the Eckert and Mauchly Computer Company closed its doors, first selling the rights to produce the UNIVAC to one of the largest makers of mechanical tabulating equipment at the time, Remmington-Rand, and going to work for them.

It was the Remmington-Rand Corporation that delivered the first UNIVAC to the U.S. Census Bureau. Many years later, documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act cleared Mauchly of any and all accusations. John Mauchly remained bitter until his death. The remains of the Eckert and Mauchly Computer Company are still part of the computer industry and are now known now as UNISYS.

During the time of the Eckert and Mauchly Company, there was another computer company in the United Kingdom. This was the J. Lyons Company, a blender of tea and baker of pastries. This unlikely place for computer development was successful in manufacturing and placing over a half dozen of what was called the Lyons Electronic Office (LEO) in various British companies during the 1950's. Unfortunately, the Lyons Company made no more of these machines.

While political events in the United States were ending the brief life of the Eckert and Mauchly Company, a tragic set of events was also being played out in the United Kingdom. Alan Turing, who was largely responsible for the Colossus machine used in WWII, had committed suicide, leaving a vacuum in computer theory and research at the university level. In addition, the Colossus project itself was still highly secret, and would remain so until the 1970's. Undoubtedly, the lost of momentum in research, the publics lack of knowledge about the importance of computing machines in WWII, and the devastation visited upon the economy of the U.K. by the war all contributed to the demise of the Lyons Company effort in building computers. Today, after a long hiatus, the computing industry of the United Kingdom has re-emerged as a world leader, but in Scotland in the area around Aberdeen known as "Silicon Glen".

When Remmington-Rand jumped into the computer business in the early 1950's with their purchase of the Eckert and Mauchly Company, a rival company was happily going about its business as the worlds largest manufacturer of punched card tabulating equipment. The head of International Business Machines (IBM), Thomas Watson, Sr., was not interested in computers and thought that they were no threat to the tabulating machine industry. Fortunately for IBM, there was a vice-president that saw that the wave of the future was in computing and had the courage to challenge that view. This person was Thomas Watson, Jr. The first IBM computer was slow compared to the UNIVAC, but it was cheaper because it was mass-produced. In addition to its lower cost, the IBM 360 computer did not require users to convert to magnetic tape and fit directly into punched card installations. Businessmen had grown to trust punched card technology. Here was a computer that let information storage continue in an accepted form and was less expensive in part because it used the card readers businesses already had. IBM not only got into the computer industry but, with its superior sales force, quickly became the industry leader.

During the 1950s, the Sperry Corporation bought Remington-Rand. The chief source of working computer technology was now the UNIVAC division of Sperry-Rand. For reasons that seem very short sighted today, Sperry-Rand decided not to devote the resources needed to become the dominant computer manufacturer of the day. Instead, over the objections of Eckert and Mauchly, Sperry-Rand executives decided to license the technology contained in the patents originally applied for by Eckert and Mauchly. While this benefited the nascent computer industry as a whole, one company benefited more than the rest. This company was IBM. Under the leadership of its new president, Thomas Watson, Jr., IBM secured what could only be described as a sweetheart deal with Sperry-Rand, ultimately paying many times less for the technology than its competition. While this alliance would eventually be severed under a suit brought under anti-trust laws, it allowed IBM to establish itself as the dominant force in the computer industry for the next 3 decades. At its height in the early 1990's, IBM was the second largest company in the world, smaller only than General Motors. Today, despite large market changes in recent years, IBM remains one of the largest companies in the world and has an income larger that some countries.

In 1964, the U.S. Patent Office finally accepted the claims of Eckert and Mauchly and issued the patents. This meant that Sperry-Rand would now receive royalties from every computer maker in the world. While the UNIVAC division was steadily loosing market share, Sperry-Rand would be in a position to dictate the success or failure of computer makers into the 1980s.

If the patent office had acted when Eckert and Mauchly first filed, the patents would have lapsed in 1964. Instead, the effect of the patent issue and the sweetheart deal between IBM and Sperry-Rand, an untenable situation was created where the entire computer industry, now a sizable economic unit, would be controlled by two companies. This led the Honeywell Corporation to bring a suit challenging Eckert and Mauchly's patents on the ENIAC. To do this, Honeywell's lawyers aggrandized the work of John V. Atanasoff. They, and Atanasoff, argued that Atanasoff had invented the computer while working on a primitive machine part electromechanical, part electronic calculating device at the University of Iowa prior to WWII. Mauchly and Atanasoff had maintained a friendship from those years through the war. Honeywell argued that Mauchly had taken many of the ideas for ENIAC from Atanasoff. The fact that Atanasoff's machine did not work, was never finished and lacked the basic ability to react to data and change its program was never mentioned. (In addition, after WWII, Atanasoff was given the opportunity to do for the Navy what Eckert and Mauchly had done for the Army. He was given lavish funding, an excellent staff and facilities that were unavailable to Eckert and Mauchly, but was unable to produce a working computer.) The fact that Mauchly had spent very little time on the ENIAC project (having to teach a full professorial load at the Moore School) and that Presper Eckert had been the engineering genius behind the building of the ENIAC was forgotten in that argument. The fact that Eckert and Mauchly had been denied permission to publish by the very person that did publish their work, erroneously or otherwise attributing it to John von Neumann, was ignored by the Sperry suit. The judge, in full knowledge of these facts, agreed with the Sperry-Rand suit. Voiding the Eckert and Mauchly patents was the only way that the judge could break the monopolistic hold over the computer industry of Sperry-RAND and IBM.

For the industry, it was a new beginning. In just a few decades, competition went on to produce computer systems unimaginable to anyone in 1964.

For John Mauchly and Presper Eckert, the dreamer and the genius that had created a truly new thing, had given birth to a new industry, had seen their work claimed by others, had their business destroyed by elements of their own government and to be officially stripped of their rights to be called the inventors of the computer, this was one last insult. John Mauchly passed away at the age of 72 on January 8, 1980. Presper Eckert died on June 3, 1995 at the age of 76. While both men took consolation in the diverse uses found for computers in their lifetimes, Eckert, who was able to see so much more of the results of their handiwork, was able to accept the events of his life more so than Mauchly. As late as the 1990's, there were those that ignored these two pioneers and gave credit to others. Perhaps unsurprising, the plaque at Moore School commemorating the creation of the ENIAC does not even mention them.

However, as Mauchly had predicted, the tide of recognition has begun to turn. In 1989, the Smithsonian Institution created an exhibit on the invention and development of the computer. Despite interference from an Iowa congressman, the exhibit placed Atanasoff in the smaller section of computer pioneers, where he was credited as inventing the first electronic computer, but it notes the machine never was completed and was without the ability to change its program. Next to it they placed a very large presentation on the ENIAC, complete with actual sections of the ENIAC and information about the men who conceived and built it. The display was complete with a video of Pres Eckert describing how the ENIAC was built. 1996, on the 50^th anniversary of its unavailing, the lone surviving member of the team that had worked with Eckert and Mauchly to create it was called upon by the Smithsonian to start the remaining units of the ENIAC.

Through the 1940's and much of the 1950's, computers were constructed out of the primary electronic device of the time - the vacuum tube. Unfortunately, vacuum tubes were large, relatively expensive and had short service lives. Working at Bell Laboratories in the late 1940's, William Shockley, Walter Brattain, and John Bardeen developed the first transistor. A transistor is an electronic on-off switch that is inexpensive, very small, has a very long service life - and can take the place of a vacuum tube.

Manufacturers of computers, as did makers of other electronic equipment, rapidly switched to using transistors. The transistor was so small that computers that would have filled large rooms could be manufactured inside a single cabinet about the size of an adult. Computers became cheap enough for large universities and medium to large sized companies to afford. However, the bounty of transistors had a catch. Each transistor required three wires. Computers became extremely dense bundles of wires, making manufacturing and repair difficult. In a computer containing 10,000 to 20,000 transistors, wiring all of the components together was an enormous problem so severe that creation of more powerful computers came to a halt. This problem was called the Tyranny of Numbers and became the engineering problem of the age. Electrical engineers vied with one another to be the first to solve this problem. Fame and fortune awaited the successful.

In 1959, two companies independently developed the same solution to the Tyranny of Numbers. Jack Kilby of Texas Instruments and Robert Noice of Fairchild Semiconductor developed a way to evaporate a layer of metal onto a wafer of silicon that had been chemically modified to perform as a set of transistors and other electronic components. The metal became the circuitry connecting the components on the wafer. With the development of the integrated circuit, it was no longer necessary to wire computers by hand. Circuits that took yards of wire suddenly could be placed on a silicon wafer smaller than a pencil eraser. Wiring, which had been a tedious and time-consuming job done only by hand, became part of the automated manufacturing process. Called the integrated circuit because of its integration of wiring and electrical components, the solution of Kilby and Noice was destined to change computers more than any single other event. However, unlike the transistor, the integrated circuit was not accepted immediately. In fact, ICs were ignored for two years.

Aside from the Tyranny of Numbers, one other problem threatened to halt the growth of the computer industry in the 1950's. There was not enough software and there was no software industry. There simply were not enough similar computers to make developing and selling software a viable business. All computers were programmed "in house", within the organizations that owned them. But the biggest reason there was not enough software was computers were extremely difficult to program. Working in the binary language of the computers was extremely difficult and required someone with a high degree of patience, math skills, and knowledge of the particular computer being used. The invention of the compiler, a program that would take as input more human like code and give as output the binary code the computer needed, is credited with breaking this log jam. The first compiler was invented by a young naval officer name Grace Hopper.

Compilers allowed algebraic shorthand to be substituted by the programmer for binary. Later, this and other binary shorthand would grow into programming languages, with each programming language requiring its own compiler. Programming languages allowed more varied persons to become involved in programming and later contributed to the establishment of the software industry, as we know it today. Modern programming languages are as varied as the purposes to which computers are put. Today, there are thousands of computer languages, dozens of which are used on a regular basis in commercial endeavors, education, and research.

As an Ensign in WWII, Grace Hopper had gotten a start at the very beginning of modern computers, working as a technician for Pres Eckert during the development of the ENIAC. Hopper went on to participate in and lead the development of several milestone computer languages and, having been called back to duty after the Vietnam War, became the oldest serving active duty Admiral in the history of the U.S. Navy, retiring in the mid 1980s.

In the 1950's, the development of computers contributed to the rise, fall and change of many industries. While the transistor industry flourished, the vacuum tube industry all but disappeared. Large companies began to use computer systems rather than legions of clerks. Manufacturers began to control machinery on assembly lines with computers instead of people. This replacement of human workers with computer-controlled devices and computer systems was referred to as automation. It was a term with which every factory and office worker in America became familiar. Fortunately, the general prosperity of the times limited the potential unemployment problems in the United States. Nonetheless, automation caused disruption in the lives of many people.

When Jack Kilby and Robert Noice solved the Tyranny of Numbers problem in 1959, they and their companies assumed that the electronics community would accept this new technology immediately. In fact, companies that had spent huge amounts of capital converting from vacuum tubes to transistors just a few years earlier were reluctant to do the same in order to convert from transistors to integrated circuits. There was one customer, in those early years of the 1960's, who was desperately waiting for ICs. The Cold War had insured that the U.S. Department of Defense would become a strong customer. ICs were lightweight, small, cheap, and highly reliable, which made them perfect for use in high performance aircraft, ballistic missiles, and other sophisticated weapons systems. Spectacular as these things were, these uses of ICs were largely secret. While the DOD would demand all of the output of IC manufacturers for the first years of the decade, the industry did not expand into the civilian sector until later and so did not impact the computers of that time.

Integrated circuits did not move into the civilian sector until a highly public display of their capabilities and reliability. One of the manifestations of the Cold War was a race between the United States and the Soviet Union in the exploration of space. The Soviet launch of the first artificial satellite in 1957 and the orbital flight of Yuri Gagarin in 1961 gave the world the impression that the Soviet Union was a more technologically advanced country than the U.S. Faced with this lose of prestige abroad and at home, President John F. Kennedy challenged the nation to land a man on the moon by the end of the decade. NASA, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, was charged with accomplishing this. Landing a man on the moon was largely regarded as an engineering problem, i.e. how to design a powerful enough rocket to lift three men, the necessary equipment, and supplies to keep them alive for over a week in space. However, one problem plagued the designers. When the astronauts in the Apollo capsule reached the vicinity of the moon, rocket motors had to be fired with high precision to place the spacecraft in a lunar orbit prior to a lunar landing. These same rockets would have to be fired again, with the same degree of precision, to break away from lunar orbit to return to Earth. The computers of the day were well able to perform the calculations and control the firing of the rockets within the time period available in order to make this maneuver successful. The problem was that, in both cases, the spacecraft had to fire its engines on the far side of the moon, out of radio contact with computers on the Earth. Existing computers, constructed out of tens of thousands of transistors, were certainly too large to fit in the spacecraft and too fragile to survive being hurled on a none too gentle round trip of 500,000 miles. What NASA needed was a small, lightweight, and reliable computer and the only way to build them was with ICs. NASA commissioned what was then the smallest computer in the world to be constructed out of ICs. It was about the size of a four-slice toaster and weighed just a few pounds. In 1968, when Apollo 8 rounded the moon and passed out of radio contact with NASA controllers in Houston, the fate of the three astronauts aboard rested squarely on the ability of this tiny on-board computer to control the firing of the rockets to guide them into lunar orbit. To the obvious relief of all concerned, the computer functioned perfectly then and on each successive lunar mission. While the public was generally unaware of the role ICs played, their daring use on the Apollo spacecraft did not go unnoticed in the electronics community. Integrated circuits quickly became standard components of computers.

In the 1960's, computers were still mostly used to compute. However, there were those that saw other uses for a machine that could have its purpose changed by changing its instructions. Ivan Southerland, then a graduate student, devised and demonstrated a program that allowed a computer to draw and, still in the 1960's, went on to build the first virtual reality computer system. Late in the 1960's, another visionary, Doug Englebart, demonstrated a fundamentally different way of interacting with a computer via a pointing device he called a mouse.

While the computer establishment was not unaware of Southerland's and Englebart's work, they did ignore it. Computing at the time was generally not interactive. In fact, very few people actually interacted with computers. Instructions and data were placed on cards, paper tape, or magnetic tape by programmers and data-entry personnel, which were then given to computers by a human operator. Output from a job (as running a program was called) was in the form of cards, magnetic tape, or printed on paper. Once a program was running, nothing could be changed about the program. A job could only be run or terminated. Exciting as it was the work of Southerland and Englebart was too radical to have an immediate impact. It would require a photocopier company to put their work to use.

Because of integrated circuits, computers became smaller. In fact, computers became small enough to fit on a desktop and cheap enough for individuals to own, although no one in the large computer companies new why individuals wanted to own them. After all, most computers of the time were fantastically expensive to own and very difficult to operate.

The early 1970's saw the first commercial personal computer. Named the Altaire, it was about the size of a large VCR, was constructed out of integrated circuits, cost about $500.00 and came as a kit which had to be assembled. To the surprise of the industry giants, the Altaire and its many imitators were enthusiastically received. A new term was coined - PC, which stood for Personal Computer. Rapidly, small computers improved and new uses for them were found. Soon, startup companies were turning out software as well as hardware to meet the growing demand for these enigmatic devices. The machine that was named for its first public use - computing gun tables - was rapidly becoming what it is today, a text processing, drawing, image processing, speech synthesizing, reality generating, advising, communicating tool. It was in the 1970's that the idea of a computer as a general-purpose machine finally began to take hold.

In 1970, large computer systems were sold as packages of machinery and software, not unlike today. However, the hardware manufacturer almost exclusively provided the software. Indeed, the only way for users to buy the software was to also buy the hardware, and vice versa. This practice was called bundling. By 1970, IBM was certainly large enough to attract the attention of the U.S. Justice Department. Suing under the anti-trust laws, the Justice Department forced IBM to unbundle - to sell its hardware and software separately. As a result, a number of startup companies began creating and selling software for IBM computers. This, along with the development of the PC, started the software industry as it exists today.

In the 1970s, the Department of Defense was looking for ways that research and development facilities working for them could be tied together. The solution to this was a wide area network called ARPNET. In the late 1970s, a small number of laboratories were linked via existing mainframes (very large multi-user computers). This allowed documents to be passed, software to be shared, and even remote use of other computing resources. Unknown to those using it at the time, this fledgling network would become ubiquitous in just 20 years.

As important as the three previously mentioned events were, the most important event of the 1970's was something else altogether. In the early 1970s, Xerox was the most widely known maker of photocopy equipment in the world. As a company that specialized in making equipment for paper based offices, the top-level executives at Xerox became alarmed at the industry wide speculation about computers making possible paperless offices. Today, over twenty years later, a substantial number of businesses use electronic data communications whenever possible. Of course, paper based communication is still very important. Seeing the trend at the time of the growing importance of computers to business and viewing computers as potential competitors to its own product, Xerox decided to try a bold gamble. If computers were to be the main component of offices of the future, some of them were going to be Xerox computers - or, at least that was the plan.

And what a plan it was! Xerox recruited the best and brightest young post doctorate researchers in computer science and computer engineering in the world and provided them with a lavish workplace with virtually unlimited funding. This was called Xerox P.A.R.C. (Xerox Palo Alto Research Center). The researchers of Xerox P.A.R.C. were given only the vaguest of directions: Make a computer that would be easy to use and provide all of operations a standard office as part of its software.

The work at Xerox P.A.R.C. paid off handsomely. Years ahead of its time, the Altos computer system rolled off the assembly line in 1975. The Altos had a screen the shape and size of a page of paper. All functions were controlled with Englebart's mouse through a series of iconized menus and dialog boxes. The Altos looked and acted like an office. Documents were created or edited, then stored in file cabinets. Documents were disposed of in a wastebasket or could be moved around on the desktop representation. The machines could be networked so those documents could be sent to other network stations. In effect, the Altos had the first graphical user interface (GUI), local area network (LAN), E-mail, and was used interactively via a keyboard and mouse. It was elegantly designed, effective, simple to use ... and a flop! At $45,000 each, more than twice the average cost of a 3 bedroom house at the time, the Altos was just too expensive for the people who needed it the most. The Altos was scrapped. Having seen the future, Xerox could not see that the forces of demand and competition in just a few years would drastically reduce the price of computer hardware.

With the Altos on the scrap heap, Xerox got out of the computer business. The world would have to wait for computers that were both effective and easy to use, but the work at Xerox P.A.R.C. was not lost. In the years 1979 to 1984, about the time that Xerox was getting out of the personal computer business, the demand for personal computing was increasing. In the late 1970's, two hi-tech prankster / enthusiasts, Steve Jobs and Steve Wosniack (often called "the two Steves"), hit on the idea of making a line of simple, inexpensive computers. Called the Apple, it may have joined the Altos in the dustbin of unused ideas were it not for the intervention of Mike Markalla, a retired INTEL executive. Markalla saw the potential of an affordable personal computer. Under Markalla, Jobs and Wosniack created a line of computers called the Apple II. Using modern assembly line techniques and mass marketing software, Apple Computer became one of the most dramatic success stories 1980's. In the early days of the company, employees were paid in stock as often as money. In a true rags-to-riches story, when Apple went public a few years after its creation, more people became instant millionaires than at any previous time in history.

All of this would have merely been a nice story in a financial magazine were it not for the vision of Steve Jobs. In 1979, Jobs was given a tour of Xerox P.A.R.C. Stunned at what he saw going unused and unmarketed, Jobs returned to Apple and began work on a new type of computer system.

In 1984, complete with television commercials that invoked images of "Big Brother" from George Orwell's 1984 to describe IBM, Apple introduced the first Macintosh computer system. The Macintosh boasted Englebart's concept of the mouse and Xerox P.A.R.C.'s concept of the GUI (graphical user interface). At around $5,000, the Macintosh was not cheap, but was very competitive with IBM's XT line of personal computers. Apple Computer had demonstrated the future. Inevitably, computer users, computer manufacturers, and software writers began to move to the more intuitive graphical user interface for their software and computers. Although not well accepted until the 1990s, Microsoft released a version of its Windows operating system as early as 1986. Such companies as Amiga, Geoworks, Deskview, Sun Microsystems and others began to create their own graphical user interfaces.

Markalla stayed with Apple until the mid 1990s, guiding the company to a peak market share of 15% of computer systems sold, while Jobs and Wosniack both left the company in the late 1980's. By 1997, Apple's share of computer system sales has shrunk to less than 3%. At that time, Apple gave Maralla the boot, then later brought back Steve Jobs to run the company. Since then, Sun Microsystems and Bill Gates, the founder of Microsoft and personal friend of Jobs, invested heavily in Apple Computer. (Sun is heavily involved in the development of software and hardware for the INTERNET. Microsoft is heavily involved in the development of any type of software.)

Currently, the unarguable winner in the graphical user interface competition is Microsoft, with its line of Windows products. Today, although Microsoft makes almost no hardware, Microsoft Windows products are included on about 85% of the personal computers sold. The founder of Microsoft, Bill Gates, is considered one of the wealthiest individuals in the world.

Microsoft is not without competition. Under Jobs, Apple and its alternative operating system has made a strong comeback. Additionally, various versions of the Linux operating system are beginning to cut into the Microsoft GUI monopoly. At this writing, Microsoft has been found guilty of a number of anti-trust violations and sentenced to be divided into two parts. One part is to have control over the Windows operating system / GUI. The other part is to have control over all other software. While the appeals for this case may take years to finish, the speculation of the effect of this breakup on consumers and industry alike are already beginning to be felt.

The 1980's saw several trends in computing. Computers became more accessible, partly because they were easier to use, partly because software was being written that allowed the computer to do more things and partly because they were becoming dramatically cheaper. Computers that used to fill a room, requiring a staff of operators and programmers, plus enough air conditioning to cool a fair sized building, could fit on a desk top and were affordable by almost any business and many individuals. The integrated circuit, each one of which had taken the place of hundreds or thousands of single transistors or vacuum tubes and could be mass-produced for prices that ranged down to pennies, was responsible for this dramatic decrease in size and cost. Repair became a matter of replacement of units of components called boards or cards rather than painstaking error tracing and replacement of individual parts. If an IC or group of ICs failed to function, they could be replaced relatively cheaply. These trends have continued into the present.

From its modest start in the 1970's, the ARPNET grew rapidly in the 1980's. Universities doing work for the government were linked to it. No longer limited to facilities working for the DOD, it became known as the INTERNET. Soon, graduate students were using the INTERNET to send resumes to potential employers and universities were making a growing number of documents available for anyone to use from any other location on the INTERNET. The amount of information available on the INTERNET became so large that a new system for finding these resources was created. The WAIS (wide area information service) was a vast improvement over the way the INTERNET was used previously. By running a program called GOPHER, a person operating a UNIX operating system based work station could navigate the INTERNET by selecting from menus of categories or could find the locations of specific resources and documents by using a search engine. The WAIS GOPHER was so successful at providing ease of use of the INTERNET that more facilities became connected and vastly more documents over many and more diverse areas were made available.

First confined to the domain of engineers and computer scientists, the ease of use provided by the WAIS GOPHER began to attract more varied individuals to the INTERNET. The successful marketing of the GUI on the Apple Macintosh and other platforms had alerted a growing number of people to the abilities of computers as graphical and textual processing devices. In addition and independent of the INTERNET, a new form of document was being developed. This new type of document was called hypertext. Anyone using a hypertext document via a special reader called a browser could navigate through the document via a series of hyperlinks. A hyperlink could be to any other part of the document, to an expanded version of the previous text, or - daringly - to another document. As more and more personal computers came to have graphical and audio capabilities, hypertext documents were expanded to include sound, graphics and video. These new documents became known as hypermedia. With the development of hypermedia documents, the next major step for the INTERNET became clear. No longer would a user be required to navigate the INTERNET from location to location looking for documents. Rather, related documents at various locations could be joined together via hyperlinks and now these documents could contain all the elements of multimedia software. Search engines changed from finding the location of documents to finding hyperlinks to documents. With hypermedia in place, the real INTERNET revolution had begun.

Computing in the 1990s was dominated by three large trends. The first event is the spread of the personal computer. The first Macintosh, with software and printer, cost as much as the average four-door sedan. In 1987, an 8086 or 8088 processor driven computer with 640Kb or RAM, two floppy drives, bad graphics, no hard drive, no modem, no mouse, no multimedia abilities, and no software cost between $1,100 and $1,300. At the time, this was considered an "entry level machine", i.e. it was the type of computer most people who wanted one could afford. With what would be described today as primitive software and a 9-pin dot matrix printer, the cost of this machine was usually about $2,000. With the exception of dumping (sales of machines leftover after a line of computers is no longer manufactured), the price of hardware for an entry level machine remained stable to 1998.

By 1998, for between $1,100 and $1,300 the hardware included on such a machine improved to include a Pentium class processor some hundreds to thousands of times faster than the 8086 or 8088 processors, a generous sized and fast hard drive, at least 16Mb of RAM, one floppy drive that holds two to four times more than the ones used in 1987, a mouse, high resolution graphics, a fast modem, and multimedia capabilities.

Today (2000), entry-level computer systems sell from $600 to about $2,000, depending on the brand purchased. It may include a high quality printer, GUI based operating system software, and some type of personal productivity software. Today, the average personal computer is more powerful than the mini computers (medium sized computers used by multiple people) of previous decades and even the mainframes (very powerful multi-user computer systems) of the past .

Another major event of the 1990's has been the expansion of the INTERNET. With the introduction of hypermedia and the spread of powerful personal computers, millions of people have gained access to the INTERNET. With the move of businesses and other organizations to the INTERNET, many activities that were previously confined to regular business hours have become available on demand 24 hours a day.

The last major computer event of the 1990's is the most overlooked. This is the continuing spread of computers as embedded controllers inside existing devices. Today, computers are not remarkable for their presence. IC processors control everything from microwave ovens to automobile ignitions.

Computers are found in everything from classrooms to newsrooms. It would be a poor TV station indeed that could not generate text, plus overlay and modify graphics images. Modern telecommunications depends on the IC. Mass produced software exists for almost every imaginable purpose. Virtual reality hardware and software allow people to experience worlds that may not yet exist or something as practical as learning to operate an industrial crane without having to risk expensive equipment and lives to do so. Artificial intelligence systems allow physicians to do blood work-ups by simply learning to operate a machine. Computer Aided Design / Computer Aided Manufacturing (CAD/CAM) and Computer Integrated Manufacturing (CIM) allow designs to be directly built in a prototype or assembly line model. Easily edited word processing and desktop publishing documents have replaced the laborious process of typing on or setting type for printed media. Processors have become so inexpensive that they are even included in some greeting cards just to play songs when the card is opened.

Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs) such as the Newton (developed by Apple Computer), OmniGo (Hewlett-Packard), and Pilot (U.S. Robotics) are becoming required tools for a number of careers and professions. PDAs come in all sizes and levels of abilities, from shirt pocket size to the size of a hand-held graphing calculator, from a simple address book to full feature computing devices. Full feature models cost about one fourth to a half of a laptop computer and accept user handwriting via a special stylus. Information can be transferred to and from a PDA to a desktop computer, or the PDA can be attached to a monitor, keyboard, mouse, printer, modem, etc. for use as a desktop computer. PDAs currently are limited by the lack of on-board storage space, but, if current development continues, PDAs could replace the PC as the device of choice for education, government and business in just a few years. PDAs are also currently limited in processing power, but that is relative. The processors used in the PDAs are already more powerful than many of the personal computers of the 1990's.

Computer networks, which were started back in the 1960s, have become a very powerful force. Once only possible for installations with expensive mainframes and mini computers, one of the most common networks today is the one demonstrated at Xerox P.A.R.C. in the 1970's, the LAN (local area network). Using LANs, schools and offices are sharing resources throughout entire organizations where previously these resources were once confined to a small physical area. Of course, the largest network of all is the INTERNET. A WAN (wide area network), consisting of tens of thousands of major and uncounted minor computer installations, the INTERNET has become a major source of information and a steadily growing way to communicate and do business.

With LAN networks and the INTERNET, the very definition of many organizations has changed. No longer do people working together have to all be in the same physical location or be employed by the same entity. Today, the Intranet (network of networks) concept is changing the way the networked organizations organize themselves. Using a browser as the basis for all functions on the traditional GUI desktop, every member of an organization can be given access to the same resources in the same way. It no longer matters how far away from the resources the user is or what personal computer hardware or operating system / GUI is used. If the computer system has INTRENET access and has a browser, a user may have access to many resources that once were confined to large or single systems.

With the addition of inexpensive remote devices, computer networks of PDAs that use software across the INTERNET (instead of personal computers loaded with expensive copies of software) may soon become a reality. Some software is already available on the Internet for use across the Internet by fee or lease.

The computer, once a tool only for governments or very large corporations and an unaffordable luxury for small businesses and individuals, has become an indispensable tool for most enterprises and an uncomplaining servant to unknowing users. The computer has become in reality what was only vaguely imagined in the 1960's, a device that has no specific physical form that can be turned to any purpose by finding a way to instruct it. The computer has outgrown its name. Called computer because it was first used to compute, it has become the first, and to date only, general-purpose machine.