BOOK
"He spoke with a forked tongue. ... He was not to be trusted," J. Presper Eckert once said of world-famous mathematician John von Neumann. Of course, von Neumann's star would shine brightly in the world of early computing - fueled, in part, by the barely acknowledged work of Eckert and his colleague John Mauchly, whose tale is now told in ENIAC: The Triumphs and Tragedies of the World's First Computer.
These two men - in the early '40s just bit players in a high-profile technical world - designed and built the first functioning electronic digital computing engine (not quite the stored-program computer we use today). Their story, the ups and downs suggested by the subtitle, and their anger at not receiving proper credit for their ideas are the subjects of this engagingly written book by Scott McCartney, a staff writer for The Wall Street Journal.
ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer), completed in 1946, was hundreds of times faster than its mechanical or electromechanical predecessors. Built under heavy wartime pressure at the University of Pennsylvania's Moore School in order to compute urgently needed ballistics tables for the US Army, it was not finished in time to meet that need, but it was applied to a number of then otherwise intractable problems at the government's Los Alamos weapons lab. (By that time, Eckert and Mauchly had become fully involved with conceiving their next and most famous computer, Univac.) ENIAC was decommissioned in 1955, by then a curious relic of technologies past.
The technically minded will not find much real meat in this book. Its discussions of the underlying technologies are quite simplistic. (Little attention is paid to ENIAC's architecture, and the author doesn't seem to understand the critical difference between diode and triode vacuum tubes.) But the descriptions, such as they are, do provide the lay reader with enough of a sense of the basic technical issues to be able to follow the drama of ENIAC's creation.
It is that drama which is the real story here. Eckert once complained, "I never did anything mean to [von Neumann]; I don't know why he should do something mean to me." The cast of characters (famous and unknown), the contending egos, and the egregious acts of dishonesty and deceit make this book an absorbing read for anyone who savors the human stories that always underlie great events.
ENIAC: The Triumphs and Tragedies of the World's First Computer by Scott McCartney: $23. Walker and Company: +1 (212) 727 8300.
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