[klelatti]

ENIAC was very important but this article overstates its significance and ignores other (non US) machines to the point of historical inaccuracy. No mention of Z3 or Manchester Baby for example, the latter based on the von Neumann paper for example, was arguably a more accurate pointer towards how computer architecture would develop.

[BirAdam]

ENIAC was far more important for the general computing industry than other machines of its time. ENIAC led to EMCC (the first computer company) and UNIVAC. It was UNIVAC and IBM struggling against one another that created the entire industry.

[adrian_b]

The publication of the von Neumann report has been many orders of magnitude more important for the computing industry than ENIAC.

Soon after that publication, many teams in many places and in several countries have started designing computers and a lot of research results have been published by them, which has lead to the establishment of the computer industry.

The first computer company was a flop, they got lucky that they were bought eventually, otherwise they would not have been able to deliver a useful product. UNIVAC was indeed the first important commercial computer (not the first commercial computer). Nevertheless, UNIVAC was mostly already obsolete at the time of its introduction, due to the use of the delay line memories, for which better alternatives were known. UNIVAC did have a technical first nonetheless, it was the first to use magnetic tapes. However soon the competition (i.e. IBM) made more reliable and also cheaper magnetic tape units.

In USA, UNIVAC had the advantage of being the first on the market, but the IBM computers that followed shortly were more innovative, so IBM deserved becoming the leader of the market instead of UNIVAC. Moreover, IBM was more open at that time and they published a lot of useful technical information about their computers, which contributed to the advancement of the entire computing industry.

The ENIAC team and their successors had a quite minor contribution to the early years of the US computing industry, in comparison with research centers like IAS, universities like MIT, government agencies like NBS (the predecessor of NIST) or companies like IBM, ATT and a few others, all of which introduced essential innovations in computers and they also published the results of their work, enabling the reuse by others.

[hedora]

IBM built the Harvard Mark 1 in 1944, before EMCC existed.

[adrian_b]

Then IBM also built the hybrid electronic-electromechanical IBM SSEC computer (operational from January 1948), which was a truly general-purpose digital computer, which was available before any fully-electronic computer and for a few years it was the most powerful computer of the world and it solved many important problems.

While ENIAC, being completely electronic, remained faster than SSEC for a few problems, most problems could not be solved at all on ENIAC, because it had no big-capacity memory, so for most computing problems SSEC was the best choice until the completion of the first electronic computers with memories based either on cathode-ray tubes or on delay lines or on magnetic drums.

IBM SSEC was available as a public computing service, so it was used by many companies and institutions. Besides SSEC, before the first electronic computers there were a few others electromechanical computers, e.g. at Bell Labs or at Harvard, but those were slower and had fewer users.

[sebastos]

Wait, where are you thinking the von Neumann paper which came from?

[klelatti]

The paper came out of work on ENIAC and was adapted to follow the approach in the paper but Baby was built from outset to use that approach and its design much more closely matches the architecture that has been used by almost all digital computers since. I don’t dispute that ENIAC is important but it’s role is more nuanced than this article implies.

[adrian_b]

The von Neumann report was written after von Neumann had several discussions with the ENIAC team about how to make a better computer as a successor for ENIAC.

The report was not published formally, but it was "leaked", so it does not have any credits for the ideas contained in it.

Because of this, with few exceptions it is impossible to determine with certainty which parts of the report are original ideas of von Neumann and which parts are ideas that von Neumann might have learned during the discussions with the ENIAC team.

An example of an idea that certainly did not come from the ENIAC team was the proposal to use an iconoscope CRT as the main memory (which was implemented first in the British Manchester computers, so such a memory became known as a Williams-Kilburn tube). The ENIAC team had a different idea of what to use as a memory, i.e. delay lines taken from radars. Von Neumann replaced this suggestion with a CRT, because he thought that a random-access memory is better.

The von Neumann report had an exceptional importance because it defined with perfect clarity what a digital computer should be, which should be its structure and then provided a detailed description of how such a computer should be designed, which was good enough to enable anyone who read the report to build such a computer. This effect really happened, and a great number of teams at universities, government agencies, independent research centers like IAS and various companies, both in USA and in other countries, have built electronic computers in the following decade, exploring various design options.

There is no doubt that the clarity of the report is due to von Neumann and whichever were the ideas of the ENIAC team about a future computer, they were much more jumbled.

Because the ENIAC team did not publish their ideas (and they did not intend to, because they already wanted to monetize what they had learned about computers, by founding a private company), it does not really matter what they thought. The world has learned how to make general-purpose electronic computers from the von Neumann report.

ENIAC was a programmable computing automaton, but it was not a digital computer in the modern sense of the word, i.e. a digital system with 4 levels of closed positive-feedback loops (the complexity of a digital system is determined by the number of levels of nested positive-feedback loops, combinational logic has 0 levels, a memory has 1 level, an automaton has 2 levels, a processor has 3 levels and a computer has 4 levels; these are minimum numbers, as a real device may have more levels than strictly necessary, to achieve various advantages).

[sebastos]

The ENIAC team’s decision to spin off and incorporate was surely pushed along by how they got screwed multiple times by the academics - Goldstine and Von Neumann, plus the university itself. It’s easier to celebrate the free publishing of ideas if your name is at least going to be on the paper.

It seems like you’re not trying particularly hard to avoid the idea of “monetizing” the computer to sound pejorative. It was the creation of the computer _industry_ that transformed the world and established the import of computers, was it not? You were never getting there without monetization. What good is the spread of ideas if someone, somewhere doesn’t eventually start selling computers? This grates especially hard given that the academics were the ones who acted unscrupulously by lifting their ideas and publicizing them without permission or credit. (“Leaked” is a charitable way to say “deliberately disseminated without caution”).

I agree the stored program is important, but the stored program is of ENIAC vintage, even if it wasn’t implemented on it. And Eckert and Mauchly definitively came to this idea before the involvement of Von Neumann. The thing is, they had an obligation to finish the machine they had promised to build for the army before pursuing such a major redesign. So all they COULD do was informally collect their ideas for a 2.0. Von Neumann arrives, absorbs what they’re up to, synthesizes it (including ‘the big idea’ that ENIAC was missing), and the rest is history. That synthesis is published without their names, and that is why we talk about the Von Neumann architecture. Look, I’m sure it’s true that the crispness of that paper can be attributed to Von Neumann, but it’s a non-sequitur to assume that Eckert and Mauchly’s ideas were jumbled. They were at least organized enough to be building a working machine in the background, and if we’re going to argue that the important thing was promulgation of enough information for others to replicate, than the practicum is more important than mathematical tidiness.

In fact, if we’re talking about how the ideas spread, the paper is frankly overblown. The Moore school lectures were really what caused the Cambrian explosion of electronic computing. There, you can find Eckert and Mauchly utterly central to the elucidation of how to build a general purpose electronic computer. And hey look, there they are, deliberately sharing the ideas out to interested practitioners, in a more pragmatic and direct way than the paper.

What I’m building to here is that E&M starting a company was not evidence that they were just out to make a buck. On the contrary, what it shows is that they had _foresight_ about what the next interesting chapter was bound to be. With the Moore School Lecrures, the ‘publishing of the ideas’ stage was over - the next step was to begin building more machines that could do more computation for more users. And while there was plenty that happened afterward to refine the theoretical model, they were absolutely correct that that’s where the action was. In fact, I think that if you look at what many of these proposed fathers of computing did next, it’s an excellent litmus test of how central they actually were. Some of the sillier ones like Atanasoff just forget about their supposed invention and go on with life - that’s a tell that they weren’t that interested in general-purpose, high speed computing. Whereas E&M’s follow-on work was to advance the field even in the face of great setback. This also completely deconstructs the idea that they were just thinking about artillery, or just thinking about weather. They were thinking about _computing_, and their careers afterwards demonstrate this.