East Falls: Remembering the First Computer

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In a small corner of the University of Pennsylvania’s Moore School of Electrical Engineering, marked by a small paper sign, sits Philadelphia’s portion of the remains of the Electronic Numerical Integrator And Computer (ENIAC) or what many say is the world’s first general use electronic computer.

A small panel of what used to be a massive 30-ton machine sits off in that corner in the Moore Building while engineering students sit a few feet away, browsing Facebook, chatting and eating lunch. The Smithsonian Institutions in Washington, D.C., has a majority of the remaining pieces of ENIAC, but much of it has either been destroyed or otherwise lost.

This month marked 65 years since John Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert debuted the ENIAC in Philadelphia at Penn’s Moore Building in 1946, an event that Bill Mauchly, a video architect at Cisco Systems and son of John Mauchly, said in an interview.

“It was like if today you could walk, and tomorrow you could fly at 5000 miles per hour,” explained Mauchly.

That massive jump in speed and accuracy came from the ENIAC’s ability to process information at electronic speeds, an achievement that earlier mechanically based computers, like the differential analyzers built at Penn in the early 1940s, could not attain.

“The longer the differential analyzer ran, the more the math went out of synch,” said LeAnn Erickson, a Temple professor and director of “Top Secret Rosies,” a documentary that focuses on the female human computers that programmed ENIAC and contributed, largely without recognition, to the technology advancement that ENIAC represented.

“With electronics, you have that kind of steadiness that you simply can’t get out of a machine,” she added.

With its invention funded on $500,000, or about $6 million in today,  from the U.S. military, the ENIAC was designed to calculate artillery firing tables that would aid troops with shell trajectories in combat.

According to Erickson, earlier mechanical computers would take 15 minutes to calculate 60-second ballistics trajectories. ENIAC could do the same task in less time than it took for the shell to reach the ground, running at calculating speeds over 1000 times faster than its mechanical contenders.

The ENIAC was also programmable, which allowed for its computing power to be applied to a wide range of mathematical tasks. It is widely considered to be the point where the scales tipped, the digital equivalent of the printing press that opened up the information floodgates.

Despite these technological advancements, the ENIAC remains largely unknown and absent from the city of its birth—a fact that Bill Mauchly would like to see changed.

“I would think that people would come here and see the Liberty Bell, have a cheesesteak and then see the ENIAC,” said Mauchly. “And then maybe see the Rocky statue.”

“It’s Philadelphia’s legacy. It should be here,” he added.

Mauchly and his nephew, Jim Reed, a Philadelphia-based artist and grandson of John Mauchly, consider the ENIAC’s lack of “iconization” to be attributable to a number of factors.

Elements of disconnect on the list include Philadelphia’s already overpoweringly rich history, a muddying of the historical waters due to claims that Mauchly and Eckert stole the idea for the machine from the Iowa-based inventors of the Atanasoff-Berry Computer of an early mechanical computer and a lack of a physical presence of the machine in the city around which a grassroots community could organize.

“ENIAC doesn’t have a parent that cares about it,” explained Mauchly. “It’s a fight that Philadelphia didn’t feel they were up to fighting.”

According to Reed, however, it is not the responsibility of the city to promote ENIAC’s legacy.

“There’s a whole bunch of meetings where people hit little gavels and then there’s another plaque,” said Reed. “It has to be more interesting.”

Reed and Mauchly have made efforts toward making ENIAC more interesting in the form of plans for an interactive, non-profit ENIAC museum at 3747 Ridge Ave., the Marketplace at East Falls. Otherwise known as the birthplace of ENIAC successors BIVAC and UNIVAC.

“We don’t have to pay somebody $5 million to reconstruct it,” said Mauchly. “We can do it and learn a lot in the process.”

According to Reed, the plan is not to build a regular “bug under glass” museum but rather an organization in the vein of Philadelphia hackerspaces like Hive76, Devnuts and The Hacktory, where museum-goers would help construct a full-size, working replica of the ENIAC.

“It would be much less like a traditional museum,” explained Reed. “The advantage would be that you would be bringing in people who have an interest [in ENIAC] and you could be working restoring parts and building replicas.”

The idea, though limited in funding and still in its planning stages, is to build a grassroots community around the ENIAC’s legacy of invention and advancement that will give the machine the physical presence it needs to move up to the pantheon of other Philadelphia favorites like the cheesesteak and Rocky.

“All these other cities and states have rallied around their computers and they’re rebuilding them,” he added. “Half of ENIAC exists, it would not be too hard to rebuild the rest of it.”