John William Mauchly

1.

JOHN WILLIAM
MAUCHLY
Vlad Hodyrev
Group: 2-ИС (б)

2.

Biography
John William Mauchly was an American physicist
who, along with J. Presper Eckert, designed ENIAC, the
first general-purpose electronic digital computer, as well
as EDVAC, BINAC and UNIVAC I, the first commercial
computer made in the United States.
Together they started the first computer company,
the Eckert–Mauchly Computer Corporation (EMCC), and
pioneered fundamental computer concepts, including
the stored program, subroutines, and programming
languages. Their work, as exposed in the widely read
First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC (1945) and as
taught in the Moore School Lectures (1946), influenced
an explosion of computer development in the late
1940s all over the world.

3.

ENIAC
In 1942 Mauchly wrote a memo proposing the
building of a general-purpose electronic computer. The
proposal, which circulated within the Moore School (but
the significance of which was not immediately
recognized), emphasized the enormous speed
advantage that could be gained by using digital
electronics with no moving parts. Lieutenant Herman
Goldstine, who was the liaison between the United
States Army and Moore School, picked up on the idea
and asked Mauchly to write a formal proposal. In April
1943, the Army contracted with the Moore School to
build the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer
(ENIAC). Mauchly led the conceptual design while
Eckert led the hardware engineering on ENIAC. A
number of other talented engineers contributed to the
confidential "Project PX".

4.

EDVAC
The ENIAC design was frozen in 1944 to allow
construction. Eckert and Mauchly were already
aware of the limitations of the machine and began
plans on a second computer, to be called EDVAC. By
January 1945 they had procured a contract to build
this stored-program computer. Eckert had proposed
a mercury delay-line memory to store both program
and data. Later that year, mathematician John von
Neumann learned of the project and joined in some
of the engineering discussions. He produced what
was understood to be an internal document
describing the EDVAC.

5.

Eckert–Mauchly
Computer
Corporation
UNIVAC, the first computer designed for
business applications, had many significant
technical advantages such as magnetic tape
for mass storage. As an interim product, the
company created and delivered a smaller
computer, BINAC, but were still in a shaky
financial situation. They were purchased by
Remington Rand and became the UNIVAC
division.