[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.