History of Computing Information

Information about the history of computing, assembled by Mike Muuss for your information and edification. Documents from the home of the ENIAC -- The U. S. Army Research Lab .

Online Documents

• "ENIAC: The Army-Sponsored Revolution" , by William T. Moye.
  An executive summary of the history of computing. A complete and concise presentation of the origins of the BRL and the ENIAC, with names, places, and dates. (4 pages)
• "My Life with the ENIAC - a Worm's Eye View", as lived by Harry Reed. Plus "Firing Table Calculations on the ENIAC".
• The History of Computing at BRL , by Mike Muuss.
  A chronicle of processors, software, and networking at the U. S. Army Ballistic Research Laboratory, prior to the installation of the ENIAC through 1992. (18 pages)
• Photographs of Historic Computers
• The ENIAC Story , by Martin H. Weik.
  The world's first production electronic digital computer was developed by Army Ordnance to compute World War II ballistic firing tables. This is the story of that computer. (6 pages)
• Electronic Computers Within the Ordnance Corps , by Karl Kempf.
  This historical monograph covers the pioneer efforts and subsequent contributions of the U.S. Army Ordnance Corps in the field of automatic electronic computing systems during the period 1942 through 1961, including pre-electronic computing devices, ENIAC, EDVAC, ORDVAC, and BRLESC. It also discusses the use of computers for solving gunnery problems, and provides a "family tree" of early computers. (140 pages in 7 chapters and 9 appendices)
• A Report on the ENIAC , by Adele Goldstine, 1946.
  The original technical description of the ENIAC, including diagrams and several (pre-von Neumann) ENIAC "programs".
• "A Logical Coding System Applied to the ENIAC" , by R. F. Clippinger. Ballistic Research Laboratories Report No. 673.
  The document describing how the ENIAC was made programmable. "In the Spring of 1947, J. von Neumann suggested to the author that it would be possible to run the ENIAC in a way very different from the way contemplated when it was designed; a way which had very important advantages to be discussed below." "It is hoped by the author that this report will make the task of coding problems so clear and straightforward that physicists, aerodynamicists, applied mathematicians, etc. with no prior experience with computing machines can code their own problems...." (40 pages)
• "Computers at the University of Pennsylvania's Moore School, 1943-1946" , by Herman H. Goldstine
  A description of the people, missions, and personalities that came together in the ENIAC project. Told from the point of view of then-Lieutenant Goldstine who, with the help of his superior officer, sponsored a development program at the Moore School looking toward the production of an electronic digital computer for the BRL. ENIAC was the result. (6 pages)
• Important ENIAC Dates (1 page)
• "Colonel Paul Gillon -- Grandfather of ENIAC" , by Paul H. Deitz. (2 pages)
• Dr. John von Neumann at the dedication of the NORD Hear von Neumann speaking at the dedication of the Navy's NORD computer. December 2, 1954. Digitized from a cassette tape provided by Dr. Goldstine.
• BRL's Scientific Advisory Committee in 1940 contained such luminaries as Prof. von Neumann, Prof. von Karman, Prof Rabi, COL Zornig, CAPT Simon, Lt. Gillon, Mr. Kent; they were joined later by Hubble and others. (1 photo, 3 scanned letters, 2 pages of text).
• The Technology Challenge: How Can America Spark Private Innovation? by Vice President Gore. ENIAC Birthday speech delivered at University of Pennsylvania Philadelphia, PA, February 14, 1996.

Printed References of Interest

• The Computer, from Pascal to von Neumann by Herman H. Goldstine. In 1942, Lt. Herman H. Goldstine, a former mathematics professor, was stationed at the Moore School of Electrical Engineering at the University of Pennsylvania where he assisted in the creation of the ENIAC, the first electronic digital computer.

The Purpose of This Archive

1. To help the public remember that it was the U. S. Army which initiated the computer revolution. Few inventions have had as big an impact on our civilization as the computer, and all modern computers are descended from ENIAC, EDVAC, ORDVAC, and BRLESC -- all of which were conceived of and built to address pressing Army needs.
2. To give credit to the highly skilled and dedicated military and civilian scientists and other workers through whose efforts, together with their counterparts in the private sector, met and solved a great national defense challenge while at the same time giving birth to a technology which would change the world.
3. To ensure that detailed information about and photographs of these early machines not vanish with the passage of time. Because of the ENIAC's vital role in the design of the hydrogen bomb and in gunnery calculations, much of the design information was originally classified, and few copies of the (now de-classified) reports still exist.

When the collection of documents has grown further, a CD-ROM release of this information is planned. Target date is summer of 1998.

"Where a computer like the ENIAC is equipped with 18,000 vacuum tubes and weighs 30 tons, computers in the future may have only 1,000 vacuum tubes and weigh only 1 1/2 tons."
Popular Mechanics, March 1949

U.S. Postal Service Celebration -- First Day of Issue: 50 Years of Computer Technology -- 8 October 1996

(Medium GIF 186k), (Large JPEG 769k)

At 0930 hours on Tuesday 8-October, at Aberdeen Proving Ground Maryland (home of the ENIAC) the U.S. Postal Service issued a new stamp commemorating the 50th birthday of ENIAC and the 50 years of Computer Technology that have followed.

This was the first US Stamp dedication to be broadcast live over the InterNet's MBONE. Stamp collectors in 6 countries were able to watch and listen in real time.

Army ENIAC Celebration -- 13&14 November 1996

Celebrating 50 Years of Army Computing

Agenda

On November 13 and 14 at Aberdeen Proving Ground, MD, the U. S. Army Research Laboratory (ARL) and the Ordnance Center and School (OC&S) sponsored a two-day anniversary celebration of 50 years of Army computing. The program included presentations by Herman Goldstine and Harry Huskey and reminiscences by other people involved, as well as recognition of other "pioneers." On the 14th, the Army and the Department of Defense (DoD) dedicated the ARL High-Performance Computing Major Shared-Resource Center (MSRC), part of the DoD High Performance Computing modernization (HPCM) program.

ENIAC, completed in the fall of 1945 and publicly unveiled in February 1946 at the University of Pennsylvania, was the first operational, general-purpose, electronic digital computer. Pursued by the Army as a means to speed up calculations required to produce firing tables, ENIAC was first used to solve an important problem for the Manhattan Project. In construction and use, ENIAC provided a platform for testing major component concepts, and its success stimulated the development of other machines, leading to the buildup of the modern computer industry and the pervasive presence of computers in everyday life.

The ENIAC team developed plans for the next generation machine even before completing ENIAC. In fact, engineers and scientists at the Army's Ballistic Research Laboratory (BRL) helped develop a series of machines -- the EDVAC, ORDVAC, BRLESC I, and BRLESC II. BRL personnel continued to experiment with computer hardware, software, and operations, for example, working with ARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) to expand the ARPANET, now the InterNet. In the late 1980s, the lab dedicated two of the Army's first supercomputers, a procurement managed by a man who first worked on ENIAC.

ARL, which includes elements of the former BRL, has been designated an MSRC, one of four such centers in the DoD's HPCM program. These tools will greatly enhance already extensive research capabilities in such areas as simulation, virtual reality, and scientific visualization.

Links to Other Web Sites

• ENIAC 50th Anniversary Celebration (UPenn)
• The John Vincent Atanasoff Archive  (Iowa State University)
• The History of Computing, notes from "The Machine That Changed The World" (Va. Tech)
• John von Neumann
• Smithsonian Computer History
• A Comparison Between Intel Paragon and ENIAC
• Looking Back At ENIAC: Computers Hit Half-Century Mark, by Neeraja Sankaran, The Scientist V9#16, 1995.
• First Generation Electronic Computers (1937-1953) From An Overview Of Computational Science
• Atanasoff Obituary
• The Development of the Computer (Princeton)
• Hobbes' Internet Timeline
• The Colossus Rebuild Project A British WWII-era vacuum-tube programmable logic calculator.
• Konrad Zuse: a guided tour of his computers. The Z3 was build with relays and finished in 1941. While never used in production, it was the world's first program controlled computer, pre-dating ENIAC by two years.
• The History of Computers
• American University Computing History Museum
• Goldstine Obituary

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