Oral history interview with John William Mauchly

Abstract

Address given at Sperry Univac's 1973 Point of View meeting in Rome. Mauchly discusses his early use of computers at Ursinus College in weather prediction and his determination that calculators using vacuum tubes to function at much higher speeds were feasible. He recounts his move to the Moore School of Electrical Engineering and his failure to interest anyone other than J. Presper Eckert in his research. He explains how they were able to obtain funding to build the ENIAC, the first electronic digital calculator, only after proposing its use for ballistic calculations. Finally, he describes the funding of the Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation UNIVAC computer by the National Bureau of Standards.