24 of 27 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Worthy Effort, but Not the definitive work on subject, July 22, 1999
This is a book that needed to be written, and Scott has made it clear that John Mauchly and Pres Eckert did invent and build the first electronic computer. He does describe in rational details the betrayal of John and Pres by Herman Goldstine and John von Neuamnn. Both deserve a place in the history of the development of computers, but their ambitions overreached their accomplishments. Herman saw the value of their idea for an electronic computer and did sell the idea to Aberdeen to back it and pay for it. Penn professors wanted nothing to do with what they felt to a man would be a failure. Johnny von Neumann never even heard of it until its design was frozen and the machine was nearly built. Although he was a consultant to Aberdeen, nobody told him about ENIAC because its backers also felt it would probably flop. Herman informed him of it on a railroad platform and invited him to come see it. Von Newmann was immediately captivated by it. When told meetings were already underway for a successor machine called the EDVAC (Electronic Digital Automatic Computer) he asked to join them. They met every couple of weeks. One time, von Neumann said he wouldn't be at the next meeting because he was also a consultant to Los Alamos and was needed there. One day, Goldstine came in with what appeared to be minutes of the EDVAC meetings sent back by von Neumann. EDVAC was a classified project and Herman was the security officer. Pres and John were not allowed to publish articles on either the ENIAC or EDVAC, but Herman managed to distribute von Neumann's notes widely in government and university circles. Von Neumann's note gave scant recognition to Pres or Joihn or anybody, thus the paper appeared ro be a product of von Newmann's fertile mind. Thus, the mistaken belief that von Neumann invented the stored program computer. EDVAC used a stored program. Imagine, when Pres and John applied for an EDVAC patent, they found that ambitious duo of Johnny and Herman had already applied. When confronted with this duplicity, von Neumann said he did it to ensure that the EDVAC patent would be in the public domain and not be used for commercial purposes. You bet.
Scott struggles hard on the Atanasoff saga. Atanasoff never claimed he invented the computer and nobody ever heard of him until Honeywell dug him up to keep from paying royalties on the ENIAC patent. Much is made of John Mauchly's memory of his association with Atanasoff as recorded at different times. John suffered from a disease called Heriditary Hemoragic Talengetasin (HHT) which causes lesions to be formed in the brain and holes in the lungs. One of the interviews was taken shortly after he had had an episode and had been very ill in the hospital. It is no wonder he couldn't remember incidentrs then that he could remember when he was in better health.
Now, to what is really wrong with the book. Scott did not grasp the environment in which events took place. Like a college term paper he relies on what has already been written and he has picked up errors from earlier books written by Nancy Stern. He is weak technically and can neither resist or recognize idiotic statements. Such as, BINAC had 512 bits of memory when in fact, it had 512 30-bit words of memory He didn't think it was impossible to program the trajectory of a Snark missle in 512 bits of menmory. He says the ENIAC was very personal and one could snuggle up to it. AsS one of the first ENIAC programmers, I state categorically, "That is idiotic." Also, he quotes me as though I had something to do with EDVAC. I had nothing to do with EDVAC. The quotes about Pres are accurate, but they were from the time when i worked with Pres on the design of a backup machine for the first UNIVAC. Pres was afraid the mercury delay line memory might not work so Art Gehring and I under Pres's direction did the logical design of a UNIVAC backup machine that used electrostatic memory. It was microcoded. It was never built. The mercury delay line memory worked. He also uses a description I gave of meetings a group of us had with von Neumann when we turned the ENIAC into a stored program computer. Scot claims the EDVAC meetings were held with the group sitting theater style listening to von Neumann lectured. When Hell freezes over could such meetings have taken place. Pres would never have allowed anyone to take over his meetings on his project. Scott calls Mauchly a journeyman physicist. What the Hell does that mean? Also, he says Mauchly couldn't keep up with von Neumann. I worked with both. Both were brilliant: von Neumann was studiedly gracious, Mauchly was laid back and thoughtful. I could talk about anything with Mauchly. I didn't know von Neumann as well, but I'm sure he also could discuss almost any subject.
Scott takes the position that the judge in the ENIAC patent trial played god and punished Sperry Univac for signing an exclusive cross licensing agreement with IBM. The statute of limitations had run out for fining them for restraint of trade. What he could do was take away the patent so the company couldn't benefit by it. At that time, the computer industry consisted of IBM and the seven dwarves (CDC, Burroughs, Honeywell, NCR, UNIVAC, RCA, & Digital Equipment). The judge may have felt that the dwarves couldn't survive if they had to pay heavy patent royalties.
By far, his worst treatment is that of the BINAC. The BINAC ran for 44 hours without a failure (2 machines ran in tandem and checked each other) in Philadelphia. During the demonstration, a sound system was hooked up to one of the outputs and played music as the numbers being calculated changed. As a joke, one of the engineers rolled out an egg to show it could calculate, play music and even lay eggs. Lighten up Scoot, it was a joke the BINAC didn't really lay an egg. This was the McCarthy ersa and the cold war era. Northrop, who financed BINAC, was run by the missle boys who were paranoid, Eckert-Mauchly's security status was being questioned (probably someone who had something to gain by the company's problem wrote a convenient letter to the right security agency), electronics was mistrusted, and no one knew what it took to keep a computer installation going. Northrop dismantled the BINAC, threw it into crates and shipped it to Californis. A young engineer, who had just graduated from college was hired and taken to a hangar where parts were scattered all over the floor. It was the BINAC and he was told to put it together. The BINAC didn't lay an egg. Those who managed it did. I say it was the first stored program computer. That 44-hour test was run in April, 1949.
I'm glad this book was written.
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11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
ENIAC - S. McCartney does a fine job, December 30, 1999
Scott McCartney has written an excellent counterbalance to the current literature on the invention of the computer. It is a fine contrast to Herman Goldstine's book on the subject. Here, we see a johnny-come-lately view of the great mathematician John von Neumann, a man whose profound insight into the future value of an all-electronic calculating machine gives him the shared title of inventor of computer science (along with A. Turing), not the computer. This book leaves us no doubt, it was Eckert and Mauchly's creation, a plum that many others wanted credit for once it matured. The general purpose electronic computer is fittingly the invention of an electrical engineer (Eckert) and a visionary physicist (Mauchly). This is also a good resource on the entry by women into the world of computers. I was only disappointed that McCartney did not include a bit more of the technical, engineering details about ENIAC, and its comparison to the COLOSSUS, perhaps in an appendix.
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14 of 16 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Author got it right, November 23, 1999
In the late 1980s I edited a feature magazine on the history of computing for Computerworld newspaper, and we concluded as the author of ENIAC does--that Eckert and Mauchly deserve credit as developing the first computer--with the same qualifications that the author states. Other earlier efforts, such as by Atanasoff, were important for advancing the understanding of the field, but they didn't lead to a standalone programmable electronic calculator that can be seen as the forerunner of today's machines. After Eckert and Mauchly, the field blossomed, and this book tells their story well.
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