J. Presper Eckert
J. Presper Eckert | |
---|---|
Born | John Adam Presper Eckert Jr. April 9, 1919 Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, US |
Died | June 3, 1995 Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania, US | (aged 76)
Alma mater | University of Pennsylvania |
Occupation | Electrical engineer |
Known for | ENIAC UNIVAC I |
Awards | Harry H. Goode Memorial Award (1966) National Medal of Science (1968) Harold Pender Award (1973) IEEE Emanuel R. Piore Award (1978)[1] |
John Adam Presper Eckert Jr. (April 9, 1919 – June 3, 1995) was an American
Education
Eckert was born in Philadelphia to wealthy real estate developer John Eckert, and was raised in a large house in Philadelphia's Germantown section. During elementary school, he was driven by chauffeur to William Penn Charter School, and in high school joined the Engineer's Club of Philadelphia and spent afternoons at the electronics laboratory of television inventor Philo Farnsworth in Chestnut Hill. He placed second in the country on the math portion of the College Board examination.[2]
Eckert initially enrolled in the
Development of ENIAC
John Mauchly, then chairman of the physics department of nearby Ursinus College, was a student in the summer electronics course, and the following fall secured a teaching position at the Moore School. Mauchly's proposal for building an electronic digital computer using vacuum tubes, many times faster and more accurate than the differential analyzer for computing ballistics tables for artillery, caught the interest of the Moore School's Army liaison, Lieutenant Herman Goldstine, and on April 9, 1943, was formally presented in a meeting at Aberdeen Proving Ground to director Colonel Leslie Simon, Oswald Veblen, and others. A contract was awarded for Moore School's construction of the proposed computing machine, which would be named ENIAC, and Eckert was made the project's chief engineer. ENIAC was completed in late 1945 and was unveiled to the public in February 1946.
Entrepreneurship
Both Eckert and Mauchly left the Moore School in March 1946 over a dispute involving assignment of claims on intellectual property developed at the University. In that year, the University of Pennsylvania adopted a new patent policy to protect the intellectual purity of the research it sponsored, which would have required Eckert and Mauchly to assign all their patents to the University had they stayed beyond March.
Eckert and Mauchly's agreement with the University of Pennsylvania was that Eckert and Mauchly retained the patent rights to the ENIAC but the University could license it to the government and non-profit organizations. The University wanted to change the agreement so that they would also have commercial rights to the patent.
In the following months, Eckert and Mauchly started up the
In 1968, "For pioneering and continuing contributions in creating, developing, and improving the high-speed electronic digital computer", Eckert was awarded the National Medal of Science.[4]
Later career
Eckert remained with Remington Rand and became an executive within the company. He continued with Remington Rand as it merged with the Burroughs Corporation to become Unisys in 1986. In 1989, Eckert retired from Unisys but continued to act as a consultant for the company. He died of leukemia in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania.[5]
In 2002, he was inducted, posthumously, into the National Inventors Hall of Fame.[6]
"Eckert architecture"
Eckert believed that the widely adopted term "von Neumann architecture" should properly be known as the "Eckert architecture", since the stored-program concept central to the von Neumann architecture had already been developed at the Moore School by the time von Neumann arrived on the scene in 1944–1945.[7] Eckert's contention that von Neumann improperly took credit for devising the stored-program computer architecture was supported by Jean Bartik, one of the original ENIAC programmers.[8][9]
See also
References
- IEEE. Archived from the original(PDF) on November 24, 2010. Retrieved March 20, 2021.
- LCCN 98054845.
- ^ US 2283545, Eckert, John Presper Jr., "Light Modulating Method and Apparatus", issued May 19, 1942
- ^ "The President's National Medal of Science: Recipient Details". National Science Foundation. Archived from the original on August 14, 2014.
- ^ "J. Presper Eckert". National Inventors Hall of Fame. Archived from the original on January 29, 2019.
- ^ Mauchly, John W. (1979). "Amending the ENIAC Story". Datamation. Vol. 25, no. 11.
- ^ Bartik, Jean (July 1, 2008). "Oral History of Jean Bartik" (PDF) (Interview). Interviewed by Gardner Hendrie. Computer History Museum. Archived (PDF) from the original on October 24, 2018.
- ^ "[Goldstine] enthusiastically supported von Neumann's wrongful claims and essentially helped the man hijack the work of Eckert, Mauchly, and the others in the Moore School group." Jennings Bartik, Pioneer Programmer, 518.
- LCCN 79-90567.
External links
- Oral history interview with J. Presper Eckert, Moore School of Electrical Engineering; describes difficulties in securing patent rights for the ENIAC and the problems posed by the circulation of John von Neumann's 1945 First Draft of the Report on EDVAC, which placed the ENIAC inventions in the public domain. Interview by Nancy Stern, October 28, 1977.
- Oral history interview with Carl Chambers, Charles Babbage Institute, University of Minnesota. Describes the interactions among the ENIAC staff, and focuses on the personalities and working relationships of Mauchly and Eckert.
- A Tribute to Dr. J. Presper Eckert Co-Inventor of ENIAC. 2000 Daniel F. McGrath Jr.
- ENIAC museum at the University of Pennsylvania
- Q&A: A lost interview with ENIAC co-inventor J. Presper Eckert
- 1989 interview of Eckert by Alexander Randall 5th, published February 23, 2006 on KurzweilAI.net. Includes Eckert's reflections on the creation of ENIAC.
- Interview with Eckert Transcript of a video interview with Eckert by David Allison for the National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution on February 2, 1988. An in-depth, technical discussion on the ENIAC, including the thought process behind the design.