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The Eniac, an Electronic Computing Machine

Abstract

Introduction ENIAC (Electonic Numerical Integrator and Computor) is the name given to a large general-purpose caflinlating machine, operating by the counting of elctrical pulses by electronic counting circuits, which has recently been built at the Moore School of Electonic Engineering of the University of Pennsylwania, Philadelphia. It was devised by Dr. J. Prosper Eckert and Dr. John Mauchly, then of the Moore School, and was developed for the Ballistics Research Laboratory at Aberdeen Proving Ground, this development being sponsored by the U.S. War Department on the initiative of Colonel Paul 1ST. Gillon of the Office of the Chief of Ordnance; Dr. (then Capt.) Herman H. Goldstein was closely associated with the development of the machine as representative of the Ordnance Department at the Moore School. A short article on this machine has already appeared in Nature (April 20, p. 527). I have recently returned from a visit to the United States in the course of which I had the privilege of working with this machine, and this fuller account is based on this experience.

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References

  1. Bush, I. V., J. Franklin Inst., 212, 447 (1931). See also Hartree, D. R., Math. Gaz., 22, 342 (1938); Proc. Roy. Inst., 31, 151 (1940); and Nature, 146, 319 (1940).

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HARTREE, D. The Eniac, an Electronic Computing Machine. Nature 158, 500–506 (1946). https://doi.org/10.1038/158500a0

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