ENIAC: The Triumphs and Tragedies of the World's First Computer.

AuthorLohr, Steve
PositionReview

ENIAC: The Triumphs and Tragedies of the World's First Computer by Scott McCartney Walker & Company, $23

JOHN MAUCHLY WAS OBSESSED with weather prediction, not with computing. But his meteorological obsession led Mauchly, a distracted visionary, to conceive of the first general-purpose computer--the machine with a mouthful of a name, Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer, but a snappy evocative acronym, Eniac.

His partner, the engineering ramrod for the Eniac project, John Presper Eckert, once explained that Mauchly's "goal was to forecast the weather, and it was only incidental that he found out there was just no computing machine that existed that would handle all this voluminous stuff."

This is but one of the intriguing details in Scott McCartney's book that constantly remind the reader how little has changed, in some ways, since the start of the computer age. The Internet, like the Eniac, was the result of government sponsorship and serendipitous invention. At every turn, we read stories in newspapers, magazines and books that assume we live in a unique period of technological innovation and round-the-clock work regimens. The Eniac team in the 1940s may have dressed differently, but their seven-days-a-week ways would have been familiar to the tattooed employees of any Internet start-up in Silicon Valley.

Like so many modern computer development efforts, the Eniac, designed for calculating ballistics trajectories in World War II, was late. It was ready to work in the fall of 1945, just as the war had ended. And weather prediction--Mauchly's motivation at the outset--remains one of the most ambitious chores in computing, requiring the most powerful super computers.

McCartney, a reporter for The Wall Street Journal, has written a little gem of a book, a resonant work of technological history strengthened by ample helpings of fresh research. And it is a refreshing change at a time when so many books on technology are hasty efforts to chronicle the Internet gold rush and cash in on it.

The Eniac story has been told many times before. But McCartney deftly places the Eniac project into historical perspective, sketches out the principal characters, and makes the strongest argument yet that Eckert and Mauchly did indeed invent the world's first real computer. That is a conclusion that remains a subject of debate, but McCartney's book is an explanation of why he comes down firmly on the side of the Eniac and the two men behind it.

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