John Mauchley and J. Presper Eckert made the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer, or ENIAC. Mauchley
and Atanasoff had communicated extensively during 1941 about the possibilities of electronic
computation, and many of the principles of ENIAC are similar to those of the ABC. ENIAC was
designed to produce ballistic firing tables for artillery, a forbiddingly complex computational task,
and was completely operational by the end of the war. Along the way, the ENIAC project was
lucky enough to acquire the considerable talents of John Von Neumann, who first proposed the
idea of storing the program of a computer in the computer's memory, along with the data. The
importance of this idea cannot be overestimated, since it led to the eventual practical use of the
new technology. Without a stored program, ENIAC could still be instructed to perform
different tasks, but the instruction took the form of essentially rewiring most of the machine. The
scene was set for an explosion of computer technology that dwarfed anything seen during the Industrial
Revolution.
Photo courtesy of the IBM Archives.