ABSTRACT
This chapter shows the way the first successful electronic computer in the United States grew out of an obscure project in the Moore School of Electrical Engineering at the University of Pennsylvania. In the case of the Moore School, the end in view was ballistics computations for the Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland, which was responsible for commissioning armaments for the US Army. Preceding World War II, the Moore School was placed on a war footing: the undergraduate programs were accelerated by eliminating vacations, and the school took on war training and electronics-research programs. John Vincent Atanasoff discovering a like-minded scientist, introduced himself and invited John Mauchly to visit so as to see the ABC. The extent to which Mauchly drew on Atanasoff's ideas remains unknown, and the evidence is massive and conflicting. Today, computer scientists routinely speak of "the von Neumann architecture" in preference to the more prosaic "stored-program concept"; this has done an injustice to von Neumann's co-inventors.
