Who is john mauchly in the computer timeline

Mauchly then became a physics professor at Ursinus College in Pennsylvania, a position that he held from until In , Mauchly enrolled at the Moore School of Engineering of the University of Pennsylvania to further his education.

He became friends with J. Presper Eckert, another graduate of the Moore School. It took workers eighteen months to complete the machine, and it cost over , dollars. It was built from 17, electronic vacuum tubes and weighed more than 60, lbs. The system could perform 5, additions and multiplications per second—slow by today's standards but 1, times faster than any existing machines. It was also highly reliable. It marked the beginning of a long road of computer technology development.

Eckert assumed the task of designing a new computer system, while Mauchly conducted research into the possible uses for electronic computers. They began designing an electronic computing system for their first client—the U. Eckert remained with the company as an executive and continued with the company as it later merged with the Burroughs Corporation to become Unisys.

He retired in Meanwhile, Mauchly left Rand Computing in to set up his own consulting firm, Mauchly Associates. Later in the s he formed another consulting company called Dynatrend. Eckert and Mauchly were recognized with numerous honors and awards for their work, having both received the U. Mauchly never finished his undergraduate degree. Instead her earned his Ph. They had two sons, James and Sidney. After graduation, Mauchly stayed at Johns Hopkins as a research assistant for a year, Some of his work there focused on calculating energy levels of the formalde-hyde spectrum.

Because the calculations took a long time to accomplish manually, Mauchly began thinking about the possibilities of automating functions. In , Mauchly was hired to head the physics department at Ursinus College in Collegeville, Pennsylvania. While this was not a prestigious position for Mauchly, it was the height of the Great Depression, and jobs were scarce. Mauchly was not just the head of the department, he was the only staff member.

Because of this situation, Mauchly had many teaching responsibilities that could have severely limited his ability to conduct original research. However, Mauchly was able to find the time for both.

Mauchly's research focused on meteorology, which had come to require complex calculations in recent years. He wanted to find faster ways of doing these calculations. What were called calculators at the time did not work well or fast enough.

Mauchly decided to create an electronic apparatus to accomplish this goal, perhaps with vacuum tubes. Since he did not know a lot about the subject, Mauchly decided to learn as much as possible. In , Mauchly built a small analog computer-like machine. It could do some harmonic analysis of weather data. He used the machine to write a paper on precipitation's quasi-periodicity.

But Mauchly wanted to create a better computational device. The following year he visited John V. Atanasoff, a professor at Iowa State University, to study his primitive computer and learn how vacuum tubes were used. Mauchly was disappointed by what he saw because it did not match the ideas he wanted to pursue. Later, this visit would come back to haunt him.

To pursue his goal, Mauchly took a summer class at the Moore School of Electrical Engineering at the University of Pennsylvania during the summer of He wanted to learn more about electronics so he could gain a better understanding of the field in order to build something new.

Almost fifty years prior to the invention of the Internet, A Logic Named Joe contains one of the most prescient views of the capabilities of computers in a network. Under the leadership of MIT's Gordon Brown and Jay Forrester, the team first built a small analog simulator, but found it inaccurate and inflexible. News of the groundbreaking electronic ENIAC computer that same year inspired the group to change course and attempt a digital solution, whereby flight variables could be rapidly programmed in software.