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John William Mauchly, the co-developer of the ENIAC computer and co-founder of the first ever computer company was born on August 30, 1907 in Cincinnati, Ohio, USA.
John William Mauchly
(August 30, 1907 - January 8, 1980)
His name is usually linked to that of J.Presper Eckert, his partner both in the project to build the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Calculator (ENIAC) at the Moore School of Electrical Engineering computer and in founding the first computer company, the Electronic Control Company, later renamed the Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation.
Mauchly and Eckert pioneered fundamental computer concepts including the stored program, subroutines, and programming languages. Their ideas which were published in the 1945 First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC and were taught in the Moore School Lectures were highly influential in the explosion of computer development that took place in the late 1940s.
As well as ENIAC, which can be considered the first general purpose digital computer, Mauchly and Eckert also designed and built the Electronic Discrete Variable Automatic Computer (EDVAC), the Binary Automatic Computer (BINAC) in which data was stored on magnetic tape and the Universal Automatic Computer (UNIVAC I), the first commercial computer made in the United States - although by the time it was finished the Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation had run into financial trouble and been acquired by the Remington Rand Corporation.
Read our history of Eckert & Mauchly and the machines that kick-started computing in the 1940s.
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Eckert & Mauchly and ENIAC
On This Day in 1946 - Eniac Unveiled
On this Day in 1919 - Presper Eckert born
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