J. Presper Eckert

Eckert grew up comfortable in Philadelphia, the only child of a real-estate developer wealthy enough that the family weathered the Depression without much strain. He enrolled at Penn's Wharton School to study business because his parents wanted that, then switched in 1937 to the Moore School of Electrical Engineering because he wanted that more. He was, by the accounts of classmates, a gifted and restless tinkerer before he ever built anything that mattered — the kind of student professors handed extra equipment to. In 1941, Eckert taught an electronics course at the Moore School, and one of the students who showed up was a physics professor from Ursinus College named John Mauchly, twelve years his senior and full of an idea Eckert immediately understood.

Mauchly's idea was an all-electronic computer built from vacuum tubes instead of mechanical relays, and Eckert became its chief engineer. The Army funded it to speed up artillery firing tables; ENIAC was finished in late 1945 and unveiled to the public in February 1946, eighteen thousand tubes doing arithmetic a thousand times faster than anything built before it. Eckert and Mauchly left Penn in a dispute over patent rights, started their own company, and in 1951 delivered UNIVAC, the first American computer built for a commercial customer instead of a government lab. Remington Rand bought the struggling company that same year; Eckert stayed with it, and its corporate descendants, for the rest of his working life.

In 1973 a federal court threw out the ENIAC patent altogether, ruling that Eckert and Mauchly had not invented the electronic computer but derived the idea from John Atanasoff, a physicist whose small prototype machine Mauchly had gone to see in Iowa in 1941. The ruling put the technology into the public domain, cost Sperry Rand its royalty claims, and rewrote the standard account of who invented the computer, with Eckert and Mauchly demoted from originators to elaborators. Eckert disagreed with the decision for the rest of his life and kept insisting, against the court and against the growing consensus around John von Neumann's name for computer architecture, that the stored-program idea had been his and Mauchly's Moore School work first.

He remained at the company through its 1986 merger into Unisys and retired in 1989, six years before he died of leukemia in 1995. The National Medal of Science, awarded in 1968, and a 2002 induction into the National Inventors Hall of Fame came after the patent loss, not before it, evidence that the engineering community kept crediting him even after the courtroom did not. His name is remembered now mostly in tandem with Mauchly's, the two of them treated as a single unit of early computing history, which is roughly how they built ENIAC and roughly the opposite of how Eckert, who spent his later years fighting for individual credit, would have wanted it told.

J. Presper Eckert's life against the full span of the corpus.

• ENIAC invention
  Built with John Mauchly; Eckert was chief engineer of the project 1945
• BINAC invention
  The first stored-program computer his company built commercially 1949
• UNIVAC I invention
  The first computer built for a business customer, the U.S. Census Bureau 1951
• Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation company
  Sold to Remington Rand in 1950 1946

• 1937 aged ~18 Switches from Wharton School to Penn's Moore School of Electrical Engineering
• 1941 aged ~22 Meets John Mauchly, a student in his electronics course
• April 9, 1943 aged 24 The ENIAC proposal is formally presented at Aberdeen Proving Ground
• late 1945 aged ~26 ENIAC is completed
• February 1946 aged 26 ENIAC is unveiled to the public
• 1946 aged ~27 Leaves Penn with Mauchly over patent rights and founds their own company
• December 21, 1950 aged 31 UNIVAC I is completed
• October 19, 1973 aged 54 A federal court rules the ENIAC patent invalid The judge found Eckert and Mauchly had derived the concept from John Atanasoff.
• June 3, 1995 aged 76 Dies of leukemia in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania

• John Mauchly 1907–1980
  Co-inventor of ENIAC, the first general-purpose electronic digital computer. co-invented ENIAC with
• John von Neumann 1903–1957
  Hungarian-American mathematician and engineer whose computer architecture remains the basis of modern computing. disputed the architecture credit of
• Grace Hopper 1906–1992
  Computer scientist and Navy rear admiral who helped develop early programming languages and computing. employed at Remington Rand alongside
• Herman Hollerith 1860–1929
  Invented punched-card tabulating machines used in the 1890 census and founded a corporate predecessor of IBM. extended the punched-card tradition of