John Mauchly
(Redirected from John William Mauchly)
Categories: Physicist stubs | 1907 births | 1980 deaths | Computer pioneers | Computer designers | American physicists | People from Ohio
John William Mauchly (August 30, 1907 – January 8, 1980) was an American physicist and computer engineer who, along with J. Presper Eckert, designed ENIAC, long held to be the first electronic digital computer, and UNIVAC I, the first commercial computer made in the United States. He was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, grew up in Chevy Chase, Maryland, and died in Ambler, Pennsylvania. Mauchly led the conceptual design while Eckert led the hardware engineering on ENIAC. It could add 5,000 numbers or do fourteen 10-digit multiplications in one second.
Mauchly and Eckert's patent claim on the 1946 ENIAC was invalidated by U.S. Federal Court decision in October, 1973. The suit claimed that Mauchly borrowed a concept from John Atanasoff, who designed a machine called the ABC. Sadly, the ABC never worked, and did not function as an electronic computer in any way. John Mauchly, nearly singlehandedly, changed the world in which we live. Evidence of his early work can still be seen in the basment of Ursinus College, primitive computing devices which he built in the early 1930's, long before he ever visited Atanasoff. Photos of these creations can seen in Mauchly: The Computer and the Skateboard, a biography on John Mauchly. The ENIAC was the first general purpose computer to actually work, capable of performing 5,000 calculations per second.
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