J. Presper Eckert

J. Presper "Pres" Eckert was an American computer scientist (although the term did not yet exist when he did his most consequential work). His major accomplishments were:

• Being the chief engineer of the ENIAC project, the first general-purpose electronic computing device.
• Thereby helping to convincing people generally that electronic computing devices were feasible, desirable, and useful. (The prior classified Colossus device in the UK had convinced insiders there of that, but knowledge of it was limited, although it generated numerous descendants, starting with the Manchester Baby and Manchester Mark I.)
• With a team including John Mauchly and John von Neumann, he co-designed the EDVAC, whose widely-distributed design document was the inspiration for most of the first generation of computers; almost all computers now are its descendants.
• With his co-worker, John Mauchly, he founded the Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation, from which several important manufacturers descended (among them Remington Rand, which acquired EMCC; Remington Rand also acquired ERA, and the group produced even more important descendants, including CDC).
  • That organization produced the UNIVAC I, the first commercially available computer in the US.

Maurice Wilkes has uncovered evidence (below) that he reckoned showed that Pres had come up with the idea of the stored-program computer before von Neumann joined the EDVAC effort.

Further reading

• Herman H. Goldstine, The Computer from Pascal to von Neumann, Princeton University, Princeton, 1972
• Nancy Stern, From ENIAC To UNIVAC: An Appraisal of the Eckert-Mauchly Computers, Digital Press, Bedford, 1981
• Arthur Lawrence Norberg; Computers and Commerce: A Study of Technology and Management at Eckert-Mauchly Computer Company, Engineering Research Associates, and Remington Rand; MIT Press, Cambridge, 2005
• Peter Eckstein, "J. Presper Eckert", Annals of the History of Computing, Volume 18, Number 1, Spring 1996, pp. 25-44

External links

• Presper Eckert Interview - oral history interview at the Smithsonian Institution
• J. Presper Eckert - biography at the IEEE Computer Society History Committee; contains an excellent bibliography
• A Tribute to Presper Eckert - an informed tribute from Maurice Wilkes; covers particularly the division of credit between Pres and von Neumann for the EDVAC ideas
• J. Presper Eckert and John Mauchly - biography at the Lemelson Program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology