OBITUARY : J. Presper Eckert

In the 1940s J. Presper Eckert made three crucial contributions to the development of the computer. During the Second World War he was chief engineer for the construction of the Eniac, one of the first electronic computers. He was one of the key inventors of the stored program computer - the design on which the present-day computer industry is founded. And in 1946 he was a co-founder of the firm that produced the Univac, the world's first computer for business.

Born in Philadelphia in 1919, "Pres" Eckert was a natural electronics engineer. During the 1930s he cut his teeth on crystal sets, and while at college he had part-time employment repairing juke boxes for a local distributor. He completed a bachelor's degree in the Moore School of Electrical Engineering, in his local University of Pennsylvania, in 1941.

After Pearl Harbor, in December 1941, the Moore School was placed on a wartime footing, and Eckert was offered a graduate fellowship to pursue a master's degree in defence- related electronics research. The many wartime projects undertaken by the Moore School included ballistics calculations, to produce firing tables for the army's newly commissioned artillery. Despite using the best mechanical calculating machines of the period, and a team of a hundred female "computers", the school was unable to keep up with the demand for these calculations.

In 1942, a physicist at the Moore School, John W. Mauchly, proposed the construction of an electronic computer. The army agreed to fund the project, which became known as the Eniac, and Mauchly persuaded his much younger colleague Eckert to act as chief engineer in charge of construction. The project officially got under way on 9 April 1943 - Eckert's 23rd birthday. The building of the Eniac was an engineering tour de force. When it was completed in late 1945, the machine contained an unparalleled 18,000 electronic tubes, and countless thousands of other electronic components and switches.

In summer 1944, well before the Eniac was completed, the great American mathematician John von Neumann associated himself with the project. Von Neumann had hoped that the machine would help him with calculations for the atomic bomb. But the Eniac was a special-purpose machine designed for ballistics calculations, and was not particularly suitable for von Neumann's work. He therefore joined in with discussions at the Moore School to develop a new design, for a general-purpose computer that would be suitable for all types of mathematical calculations. Von Neumann wrote up the group's final design in a classic report in June 1945. This report was the blueprint from which virtually all subsequent computers were derived.

Because of von Neumann's sole authorship of the report, the contributions of Eckert and the other participants were often overlooked - and even today people often speak of the "von Neumann computer", as if he were the sole inventor. The publication of the report, for which he had not sought the consent of all his colleagues, also constituted a technical disclosure, and prevented a patent being granted for the invention. A patent would surely have produced great riches for Eckert and his co-inventors; this, and the failure to gain full recognition for his part in the invention of the computer, rankled with Eckert all his life.

In 1946, with the end of the war, Eckert and Mauchly left the Moore School to establish the Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation, the first start- up computer firm. At a time when the computer was perceived as a mathematical instrument, Eckert and Mauchly had a vision of it as an electronic data processing machine for business. Unfortunately they massively underestimated the cost of developing such a machine, and the project was only saved by the firm's being taken over in 1950 by Remington Rand, the office machine conglomerate. The first Univac was delivered the following year at a price of $1m. Nearly 50 Univacs were eventually delivered, making Remington Rand the leading firm in the embryonic computer industry. Although Remington Rand was eclipsed by IBM in the late 1950s, it remained (and remains, after several takeovers and mergers) one of the leading computer companies.

Eckert's central role in the development of the computer owed a great deal to being in the right place at the right time, but his consummate engineering talent enabled him to exploit his opportunities to the full. He was at heart an engineer and not a businessman, however.

His days as an entrepreneur ended with the takeover of his firm by Remington Rand. After the mid-1950s, the pioneer days of the computer were over and Eckert spent the remainder of his career in various engineering roles in the Univac Division of Remington Rand and its successor companies. He was lauded by his technical community, received several honorary degrees, and was awarded the National Medal of Science in 1969.

Martin Campbell-Kelly

John Presper Eckert, computer engineer: born Philadelphia 9 April 1919; graduate fellow and research associate, Moore School of Electrical Engineering, University of Pennsylvania 1941-46; computer engineer, Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corp, Univac Division of Remington Rand and successor companies 1946-89; died Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania 3 June 1995.