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tables had fallen so far behind that new and faster means of produc-
tion were needed. The Moore School of Electrical Engineering at
the University of Pennsylvania was approached, since it was known
that several of its staff, including engineers Presper Eckert and
John Mauchly, were interested in electronic calculating machines.
The Moore School presented an idea for constructing called the
Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer or ENIAC. The
'and Computer' in the name represented Mauchly's belief that
the machine should be capable of more general tasks than simply
undertaking numerical integration, which is what interested the
military authorities.
36
The construction of ENIAC was further encouraged by the
involvement and interest of the Hungarian emigré mathematician
John von Neumann, who was involved in the Manhattan Project,
and who saw that digital computing might be the solution to the
mathematical complexities of A-Bomb design. ENIAC was actually
completed in
, too late to take any active part in the War. It was
vast, expensive and, in comparison to electromagnetic machines,
very fast. It was not quite a computer in the modern understanding,
since it lacked any data storage. But it was an electronic, digital
calculating machine, and as such is an important object in the
history of modern computing. One of its most valuable contribu-
tions was to demonstrate the far greater speeds achievable with
1945
16 Alan Turing and
colleagues working on
the Ferranti Mark 1
computer, 1951.
