J. Presper Eckert Jr.Born 9 Apr 1919; died 3 Jun 1995 at age 76.American engineer and inventor of the first general-purpose electronic computer, a digital machine that was the prototype for most computers in use today. In 1946, Eckert with John W. Mauchly fulfilled a government contract to build a digital computer to be used by the U.S. Army for military calculations. They named it ENIAC for Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer. By 1949, they had started a manufacturing company for their BINAC computer. This was followed by a business oriented computer, UNIVAC (1951), which was put to many uses and spurred the growth of the computer industry. By 1966 Eckert held 85 patents, mostly for electronic inventions. |
