John William Mauchly was an American physicist who, along with J Presper Eckert, designed ENIAC, the first general-purpose electronic digital computer, as well as EDVAC, BINAC and UNIVAC I, the first commercial computer made in the United States.
31 Facts About John Mauchly
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John W Mauchly was born on August 30,1907, to Sebastian and Rachel Mauchly in Cincinnati, Ohio.
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John Mauchly moved with his parents and sister, Helen Elizabeth, at an early age to Chevy Chase, Maryland, when Sebastian Mauchly obtained a position at the Carnegie Institution of Washington as head of its Section of Terrestrial Electricity.
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At McKinley, John Mauchly was extremely active in the debate team, was a member of the national honor society, and became editor-in-chief of the school's newspaper, Tech Life.
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John Mauchly subsequently transferred to the Physics Department, and without completing his undergraduate degree, instead earned a Ph.
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From 1932 to 1933, Mauchly served as a research assistant at Johns Hopkins University where he concentrated on calculating energy levels of the formaldehyde spectrum.
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John Mauchly's teaching career truly began in 1933 at Ursinus College where he was appointed head of the physics department, where he was, in fact, the only staff member.
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John Mauchly set up a consulting organization, Dynatrend, in 1967 and worked as a consultant to Sperry UNIVAC from 1973 until his death in 1980.
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John Mauchly died on January 8,1980, in Ambler, Pennsylvania, during heart surgery and following a long illness.
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John and Mary Mauchly had two children, James and Sidney.
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In 1948, Mauchly married Kathleen Kay McNulty, one of the six original ENIAC programmers; they had five children Sara, Kathleen, John, Virginia, and Eva.
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In 1941 John Mauchly took a course in wartime electronics at the Moore School of Electrical Engineering, part of the University of Pennsylvania.
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John Mauchly accepted a teaching position at the Moore School, which was a center for wartime computing.
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Eckert encouraged John Mauchly to believe that vacuum tubes could be made reliable with proper engineering practices.
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In 1942 John Mauchly wrote a memo proposing the building of a general-purpose electronic computer.
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Lieutenant Herman Goldstine, who was the liaison between the United States Army and Moore School, picked up on the idea and asked John Mauchly to write a formal proposal.
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John Mauchly led the conceptual design while Eckert led the hardware engineering on ENIAC.
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Eckert and John Mauchly were already aware of the limitations of the machine and began plans on a second computer, to be called EDVAC.
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John Mauchly produced what was understood to be an internal document describing the EDVAC.
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Goldstine, in a move that was to become controversial, removed any reference to Eckert or John Mauchly and distributed the document to a number of von Neumann's associates across the country.
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Besides the lack of credit, Eckert and John Mauchly suffered additional setbacks due to Goldstine's actions.
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John Mauchly knew it would be difficult to sell computers without application materials, and without training in how to use the systems.
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John Mauchly's interest lay in the application of computers, as well as to their architecture and organization.
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John Mauchly has been credited for being the first one using the verb "to program" in his 1942 paper on electronic computing, although in the context of ENIAC, not in its current meaning.
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John Mauchly stayed involved in computers for the rest of his life.
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John Mauchly was a founding member and president of the Association for Computing Machinery and helped found the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics, serving as its fourth president.
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John Mauchly was a life member of the Franklin Institute, the National Academy of Engineering and the Society for Advancement of Management.
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John Mauchly received an LLD degree from the University of Pennsylvania and aDSc degree from Ursinus College.
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John Mauchly was a recipient of the Philadelphia Award, the Scott Medal, the Goode Medal of AFIPS, the Pennsylvania Award, the Emanual R Piore Award, the Howard N Potts Medal, and numerous other awards.
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Proponents for the court decision emphasize that the testimony established that John Mauchly definitely visited Atanasoff's lab at Iowa State College, had complete access to Atanasoff's machine and the documents describing it.
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John Mauchly consistently maintained that it was the use of high-speed electronic flip-flops in cosmic-ray counting devices at Swarthmore College that gave him the idea for computing at electronic speeds.