ABSTRACT
Scientific research came to the fore in World War II, and civilian research centers became part of the war effort. One of those centers, the Moore School of Electrical Engineering at the University of Pennsylvania, became the locus of the invention of the modern computer. The Moore School was funded to compute “firing tables” for artillery. To speed up the calculations, a team led by John Presper Eckert and John Mauchly designed an electronic computer named the ENIAC. Being electronic, the ENIAC would be a thousand times faster than earlier computing technologies. Even before the ENIAC was completed, however, many design flaws became evident. The team was joined by the famous mathematician John von Neumann, which led to the invention of the stored-program concept, on which almost all future computers would be based. After the war, the race was on to build a computer of the new type. The first, a small experimental machine, was demonstrated at Manchester University, England, in June 1948. On 6 May 1949, the Mathematical Laboratory at Cambridge University demonstrated the EDSAC, the first full-scale practical electronic stored-program computer.
