Eniac

Harry Gail laughs when you accuse him of being part of the team that, 40 years ago, produced one of the most profoundly significant inventions in human history - the electronic computer. "We had no idea," he says. "We were thinking about the long hours, the complex new problems, the day-to-day work. " Then he looks across the crowded auditorium and points his finger at J. Presper Eckert, who along with John W. Mauchly conceived and developed ENIAC: "But he knew. Eckert knew we were on to something enormous.

You know how in all those old science-fiction movies there is always some giant computer with all kinds of wires and dials and tiny light bulbs, and you can tell it is really just made of wood and spray-painted black? Well, that is exactly what the ENIAC computer looks like, except with a worse paint job. But ENIAC is real, and it was the world's first general-purpose electronic computer, and you can see where Hollywood got its ideas. This year is ENIAC's 50th anniversary, and they had a big celebration yesterday at Penn, which is where the computer was built.

Iredell Eachus Jr., 85, an electrical engineer and computing and radar pioneer who lived in Bala Cynwyd for most of his adult life, died Tuesday of myelodysplasia, a blood disease, at Sunrise Assisted Living of Haverford. Mr. Eachus was born in Bryn Mawr. He had lived in Clearwater, Fla., with his son David since his wife of 62 years, Helen, died in January. His family said he was a member of the team that developed and built the first general-purpose electronic computer, the ENIAC, which stands for "Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer.

Question: When does a celebration of technology become a political event? Answer: When you invite the vice president to play a prominent role in the festivities during an presidential election year. While the University of Pennsylvania may have envisioned today's ENIAC anniversary as a homage to technology, Vice President Gore will use the event for a partisan attack on the Republican-controlled Congress. Gore will flick the switch to restart the world's first digital computer symbolically, but in accompanying remarks he plans to continue his attack on Republicans for cutting government-research spending.

It began as a 30-ton behemoth, a room-sized maze of 18,000 vacuum tubes, 500,000 soldered joints, 70,000 resistors and 10,000 capacitors. Now, it's a commonplace thing of microchips and global interconnections, of lightning brainpower that can fit in a wristwatch and bring libraries into living rooms. The computer has changed in, well, incalculable ways since Feb. 14, 1946, when a team of scientists at the University of Pennsylvania switched on the Rube Goldberg-esque machine they called the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer: the ENIAC.

Ask most people "who invented the airplane and where did it first fly," and the answer is pretty instantaneous: Wright Brothers. Kitty Hawk, N.C. Ask the same about the modern computer, and the response is likely to come with a bit more effort, if at all. Consider it another casualty of Philadelphia's penchant for blowing its lead in big industries: The federal government was spirited away to Washington; finance, to New York. And less well-known, the computing industry also had its start here, although today it is most popularly associated with California's Silicon Valley.

It was the beginning of "a new epoch in the history of human thought," declared a news story in The Inquirer. On Feb. 14, 1946, the world's first electronic computer, created at the Moore School of Electrical Engineering at the University of Pennsylvania, was unveiled to the public. It was enormous. It weighed 30 tons. It nearly filled a 30-by-50-foot room in the Moore School, at 33d and Walnut Streets. It had 40 panels, arranged in the shape of a U, that extended 80 feet.

In the dark days of World War II, engineer J. Presper Eckert was holed up at the University of Pennsylvania, feverishly working with physicist and statistician John Mauchly on a secret device for the Army to help aim artillery quickly and precisely. What the men devised was dubbed ENIAC, for Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer - the first digital electronic computer, the room-sized progenitor of today's PC. More than a half-century later, Eckert's notes - documents of potentially valuable historical significance chronicling the birth of a technology that changed the world - are sitting in two dozen file boxes in a storeroom in Aston, Delaware County.

It was back on Page 9 - a short item surrounded by advertisements for women's lingerie under the headline "Mathematical Brain Enlarges Man's Horizon. " Despite the reporter's enthusiasm about "a new epoch in the history of thought," the Inquirer's editors obviously didn't think the University of Pennsylvania's news about a new device called the computer was worth the front page. The top stories on Feb. 15, 1946, were about changes in President Truman's cabinet and "wage and price stabilization.

Jean Jennings Bartik, 86, formerly of Collingswood, one of six women who programmed the first computer, died of heart failure Wednesday, March 23, at the Pines at Poughkeepsie nursing home in Poughkeepsie, N.Y. In 1945, Mrs. Bartik was working in an Army ballistics research lab at the University of Pennsylvania when she learned about an opportunity to be a programmer for the first electronic computer, ENIAC. She and five other women were hired to break down complicated equations with the help of the 100-foot-long, 10-foot-high machine, housed in a basement at Penn, and in 1946 she coprogrammed a test problem for ENIAC's first public demonstration.

By any external measure, change is knocking at the door of Delaware County's Republicans. Boroughs that were white bastions have turned multicolored; voters are trending from R to D. Next month, the party's aging chairman yields the gavel to a lawyer in his 40s. But one towering figure of the old guard remains. He's led Upper Darby's GOP since 1975. His block captains and committee people will turn out the vote on Tuesday. He wields powers that Democrats whisper about. He makes sure Republicans get hired, they say. They imagine him running the county from a smoke-filled room.

When Iowa farm product Philo Farnsworth invented the first television in 1926, little did he know that the recognition of the world-changing invention was soon to be bestowed upon RCA Corp. in New York. Just over a decade later, another invention of humongous proportions both in girth and life impact was being developed in Philadelphia at the University of Pennsylvania. So, too, the inventors and location of that first commercial computer - the ENIAC - would become mere footnotes next to the names of Apple, Macintosh, Gates and Silicon Valley.

Ask most people "who invented the airplane and where did it first fly," and the answer is pretty instantaneous: Wright Brothers. Kitty Hawk, N.C. Ask the same about the modern computer, and the response is likely to come with a bit more effort, if at all. Consider it another casualty of Philadelphia's penchant for blowing its lead in big industries: The federal government was spirited away to Washington; finance, to New York. And less well-known, the computing industry also had its start here, although today it is most popularly associated with California's Silicon Valley.

Kathleen McNulty Mauchly Antonelli, 85, of Ambler, one of the original programmers of the first electronic computer, died of cancer Thursday at Keystone Hospice in Wyndmoor. Mrs. Antonelli graduated from Chestnut Hill College in 1942. A few weeks later she answered a newspaper ad for women with math majors and took a government position calculating artillery shell trajectories at Aberdeen Proving Ground, Md. The following year, she was among those selected to program and operate ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer)

Iredell Eachus Jr., 85, an electrical engineer and computing and radar pioneer who lived in Bala Cynwyd for most of his adult life, died Tuesday of myelodysplasia, a blood disease, at Sunrise Assisted Living of Haverford. Mr. Eachus was born in Bryn Mawr. He had lived in Clearwater, Fla., with his son David since his wife of 62 years, Helen, died in January. His family said he was a member of the team that developed and built the first general-purpose electronic computer, the ENIAC, which stands for "Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer.

Everyone - well, almost everyone - seems to own and operate a computer these days, a machine capable of traversing the Internet and sending e-mail. I don't own a computer, however, and I have little desire to find room for one in my apartment. I'm not a technological dinosaur. I have a fax machine, and I really like it. But my electric IBM typewriter works fairly well, so I'm sticking with it. I've read about how to use computers, how easy they are to operate. I've even read some technology reports replete with technical terms, model numbers, etc. My typewriter has been loyal to me, however, and I am reciprocating.

Often with an Amelia Bedelia book in hand, Miriam Glusman heads to Russell Elementary School on Friday afternoons to read with third-graders who need a little extra help. "I don't know how you grow up without being read to," said the 75-year-old grandmother. Despite health difficulties, she is an active volunteer, aiding youth and parents in the community in a variety of roles. Last Tuesday night, after a chemotherapy treatment, Glusman, a 40-year-resident of Broomall, was on her way to a meeting of the Marple Township Youth Aid Panel, which helps work out resolutions outside the court system for first-time juvenile offenders.

Fifty years ago this Saturday, the U.S. Census Bureau took custody of the world's first computer designed for commercial use: the Universal Automatic Computer, better known as UNIVAC. Built in a Philadelphia factory by a corporate ancestor of today's Unisys Corp., the premier, eight-ton UNIVAC was a leaner, meaner version of ENIAC, the 30-ton mathematical monster developed during World War II for the military and considered the original modern computer. ENIAC got the glory.