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these tables was taking far too long and the backlog was causing delays in gun
development and production. The situation seemed hopeless since the num-
ber of requests for tables that BRL received each week was now more than
twice its maximum output. And this was after BRL had doubled its capacity
by arranging to use a second differential analyzer located in the Moore School
of Electrical Engineering at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia.
Herman Goldstine was the young army lieutenant in charge of the computing
substation at the Moore School. And this was why he happened to be on the
platform in Aberdeen catching a train back to Philadelphia on an evening in
August 1944.
It was in March 1943 that Goldstine had first heard of a possible solution to
BRL's problems. He was talking to a mechanic at the Moore School and learned
of a proposal by an assistant professor, John Mauchly ( B.1.1 ), to build an elec-
tronic calculator capable of much faster speeds than the differential analyzer.
Mauchly was a physicist and was originally interested in meteorology. After
trying to develop a weather prediction model he soon realized that without
some sort of automatic calculating machine this task was impossible. Mauchly
therefore developed the idea of building a fast electronic computer using vac-
uum tubes.
Goldstine was a mathematician by training, not an engineer, and so was not
aware of the generally accepted wisdom that building a large-scale computer
with many thousands of vacuum tubes was considered impossible because of
the tubes' intrinsic unreliability. After talking with Mauchly, Goldstine asked
him to submit a full proposal for such a vacuum-tube machine to BRL for fund-
ing. Things moved fast. Mauchly, together with the smartest graduate of the
school, J. Presper Eckert, gave a presentation on their new proposal in Aberdeen
less than a month later. They got their money - initially $150,000 - and Project
PX started on June 1, 1943. The machine was called the ENIAC, usually taken to
stand for the Electronic Numerical Integrator And Computer.
It was while he was waiting for his train back to Philadelphia that Goldstine
caught sight of a man he recognized. This was the famous mathematician John
von Neumann ( B.1.2 ), whom Goldstine had heard lecture on several occasions
in his research as a mathematician before the war. As he later wrote:
Fig. 1.3 Vannevar Bush's Differential
Analyzer was a complicated analog
computer that used rotating discs and
wheels for computing integrals. The
complete machine occupied a room
and linked several integration units
connected by metal rods and gears. The
Differential Analyzer was used to solve
ordinary differential equations to calcu-
late the trajectories of shells at the U.S.
Army Ballistics Research Laboratory in
Aberdeen, Maryland.
B.1.1 John Mauchly (1907-80) and
Presper Eckert (1919-95) were the
designers of ENIAC. With John
von Neumann, they went on to
propose the EDVAC, a design for
a stored-program computer, but
unfortunately their future efforts
were complicated by legal wrangling
over intellectual property and
patents. As a result, they left the
Moore School at the University of
Pennsylvania and set up a company
to build the UNIVAC, the first
successful commercial computer in
the United States.
It was therefore with considerable temerity that I approached this world-
famous figure, introduced myself and started talking. Fortunately for me von
Neumann was a warm, friendly fellow who did his best to make people feel
relaxed in his presence. The conversation soon turned to my work. When it
became clear to von Neumann that I was concerned with the development of
an electronic computer capable of 333 multiplications per second, the whole
atmosphere of our conversation changed from one of relaxed good humor to
one more like an oral examination for a doctor's degree in mathematics. 2
Soon after that meeting, Goldstine went with von Neumann to the Moore
School so that von Neumann could see the ENIAC ( Fig. 1.4 ) and talk with Eckert
and Mauchly. Goldstine remembers Eckert's reaction to the impending visit:
He [Eckert] said that he could tell whether von Neumann was really a genius
by his first question. If this was about the logical structure of the machine,
 
 
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