
A lost interview with ENIAC co-inventor J. Presper Eckert (1989) - ingve
http://www.computerworld.com/article/2561813/computer-hardware/q-a--a-lost-interview-with-eniac-co-inventor-j--presper-eckert.html
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bsaul
So von neuman came and watched a working computer, wrote a paper, and now we
call it von neuman architecture ?? Really ?

~~~
eternalban
Jean's [1] got the skinny:

"Yeah. He would say well, probably if von Neumann knew it was going to be
published, he would have given credit to somebody; he didn’t give credit to
anybody. I just read an affidavit that was in one of the technology magazines
that von Neumann signed that said that Goldstine asked him to write the report
for publications. It was when they got permission from Aberdeen and Penn. He
knew from the very beginning it was going to be published, so the fact that he
didn’t attribute -- I mean it shows to me that he was planning to steal it to
start with, I mean that is piracy. And I don’t know why Goldstine never knew
that because back in 1984, he was still arguing in the MIT oral history that
it was his responsibility and that von Neumann was so gracious that even if
somebody were in the room when he was writing he would give them credit. I
mean that’s baloney and.."

She has some fine words to say about a few other sacred cows. Straight talk.
Per Jean Bartik, the original inventors were effectively blacklisted because
of (completely bogus) suspected communist sympathies. ("Nothing to hide" ..)

[1]: Oral History of Jean Bartik:
[http://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/text/Oral_Histo...](http://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/text/Oral_History/Bartik_Jean/102658322.05.01.acc.pdf)

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madengr
"So it's a myth that ENIAC could only add, subtract, multiply and divide. No,
that's a calculator. ENIAC could do three-dimensional, second-order
differential equations."

Did ENIAC have a hardware multiplier? The article seems to indicate it did.
Other than that, it does just add. Nothing wrong with that, as that is all
that's needed for most numerical solutions.

~~~
mzs
Yes it did, but it was more like this:

    
    
       1234567890
       *       11
     
       1234567890
     1 2345678900 +
    

shifts, adds, carries in the same register, and caries into another register.
The fewer digits, the faster it took.

