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      As in the case of Atanasoff and Mauchly, much ink and hot air has been expended over the injustice done to Eckert and Mauchly in denying them credit, especially for the stored program concept. Eckert had not only thought about this before John von Neumann joined the project; he had begun to design and build a prototype store. There was undoubtedly a conflict of interest between the academics von Neumann and Goldstine, who wanted to see the ideas in the EDVAC design incorporated as widely as possibly, and the engineers Eckert and Mauchly, who were thinking about capitalising on its commercial possibilities. The academics won hands down when Goldstine, apparently on his own initiative, distributed the report with von Neumann’s sole name on it to a couple of dozen carefully selected recipients. That was all it took to ensure that von Neumann’s name was permanently cemented to the concept of a stored program. Although EDVAC itself, eventually delivered to the Aberdeen Proving Ground in 1949, was not an especially significant machine, every subsequent computer designer was influenced by the contents of von Neumann’s report.

      When Oliver Standingford and Raymond Thompson came to see him in 1947, Goldstine was back in academic life. His boldness in accosting John von Neumann on that station platform had paid off, and he was now working as his assistant on a new computer project at the Institute for Advanced Study. The two men found him in his office on the elegant, tree-shaded campus. His mood was relaxed and expansive. If he was surprised at being approached by representatives of a commercial company, far from the world of theoretical physics and higher mathematics that he inhabited, he gave no sign of it. He listened closely as the two men explained that they were exploring the possibility of using electronic calculators in the office. ‘That’s not a problem I’ve thought about before,’ began Goldstine. Thompson eagerly explained how much of the work of the Lyons clerks amounted to routine calculation, and how their whole approach to office systems was based on distilling useful information from the mass of data.

      Goldstine instantly saw the point, and became tremendously enthusiastic. Sketching furiously on a yellow pad, he launched into a description of possible approaches to the problem given the technology that had been developed so far. At the same time he explained the advantages of electronic calculators of the type he was now working on over previous types of calculating machine. The most obvious was their speed of operation. While an IBM punched card tabulator could carry out the same processes of addition and subtraction, its speed was limited by the speed of its mechanical moving parts. The electronic calculator, in contrast, operated at the speed of an electron moving in space – in principle, each step in a calculation could be completed in less than a millionth of a second.

      The real source of an electronic calculator’s power, said Goldstine, was its potential to store its own program along with interim and final results. It would operate automatically – there was little or no need for human intervention in the course of a run. While punched card machines could carry out as many parallel operations as there were columns on the card (the standard had increased from 40 to 80 since Hollerith’s time), most electronic computers operated serially, taking one instruction or piece of data from the store at a time. However, the gain in speed and the possibility of running a large number of different operations in a single program gave the electronic computer overwhelming superiority.

      Goldstine finished by giving Thompson and Standingford a list of everyone he knew about in the United States who was doing serious work on electronic computing. Then, enjoying the astonishment of his listeners, he dropped his bombshell. ‘And, of course, there’s Professor Douglas Hartree in Cambridge, England.’

      Hartree had recently been appointed Professor of Mathematical Physics at Cambridge University. Goldstine informed his astonished listeners that one of Hartree’s new colleagues was building a state-of-the-art computer in the Mathematical Laboratory there. The two men had come 3,000 miles to find out that a computer was already under construction a couple of hours’ drive away from Lyons’s headquarters. Goldstine warmly recommended that Thompson and Standingford should talk to Hartree about their ideas for a business computer. As soon as they had left, he sat down and dispatched a letter to Cambridge on their behalf.

      With a much clearer understanding of the technology, and buoyed up by Goldstine’s enthusiasm, Thompson and Standingford then made a tour of every organisation on his list. They were not able to see ENIAC itself, which had been taken over by the army and was being rebuilt at their Aberdeen firing range. Permission initially granted was suddenly withdrawn on the grounds of confidentiality – but Goldstine said later that the army’s engineers had probably failed to get the notoriously unreliable machine working and were too embarrassed to admit it. At the Moore School itself, where ENIAC had been built in a spirit of adventure and enthusiasm, they found that the disbanding of the original team had left ‘a general air of apathy’. A smaller experimental calculator was built and working, but no one showed the smallest interest in their ideas on office computing.

      Presper Eckert and John Mauchly, who had designed and built ENIAC, had left the Moore School a year earlier (following a dispute with Goldstine and von Neumann about the right to patent their invention) to form the Electronic Control Company. They, apparently alone among the early computer pioneers, planned to develop a computer for commercial production based on the EDVAC design, to be known as the Universal Automatic Calculator or UNIVAC. Naturally, a visit to their Philadelphia office was high on Thompson and Standingford’s list of priorities.

      Eckert told them that he was talking to the Prudential Insurance Company of America about designing a machine to issue bills, and to carry out actuarial calculations. The big insurance companies had millions of policyholders and employed thousands of clerks to draft policies and send out bills for premiums. The office machinery suppliers had come up with some labour-saving devices for this kind of work, such as machines for printing frequently used addresses, but essentially the insurance business required heroic efforts of typing and filing. Prudential was the first and only example Thompson and Standingford came across of a company planning to use a computer for clerical work. A visit to its offices in Newark, New Jersey, revealed a company with an attitude as progressive as that of Lyons, though in a completely different line of business. It had a large Methods Division (comparable to the Systems Research Department at Lyons), with an innovator at its head, Dr Edmund C. Berkeley (later to become the author of the first popular computing book, Giant Brains). He was apparently confident that his company would have a machine installed and working within two years. In addition to preparing bills for insurance premiums, Berkeley planned to use the machine to prepare contracts, storing the 2,000 standard clauses and programming the machine to select those required in individual cases. This was the first Thompson and Standingford had heard of the possibilities computers offered for what we now call word processing. As things turned out, the Electronic Control Company was dogged by financial problems; in 1950 Prudential cancelled its contract with Eckert and Mauchly and later bought its first computer from IBM.

      Extraordinary as it seems today, Eckert and Mauchly were out on a limb in perceiving a need for a general purpose commercial computer which could be produced for sale. The obvious candidates to pursue such a development were the existing office machine companies, who already had the customers and the sales forces to exploit a new market. Those that the Lyons pair visited, such as IBM, NCR and Burroughs, were secretive about their own research but they seemed to be more concerned to protect their traditional products than to develop entirely new ones. Standingford later wrote: ‘We were given a polite hearing, lunch and the sort of restrained reception reserved for the mentally unstable.’

      It was a relief to have their confidence restored with a second visit to Goldstine. They found he had spent the intervening weeks thinking about the special requirements of office computing, and he gave them a detailed list of the components their computer would need. This time he took them to his engineering labs and showed them not only his partly built computer but prototype peripherals such as a device that would load programs and data into the machine through spinning magnetic wire (a forerunner of magnetic tape) from one reel to another. Profuse in their gratitude for Goldstine’s information and encouragement, Thompson and Standingford returned to New York and the boat home in a state of intellectual euphoria. Their minds were ablaze with the possibilities before them. While some might have used the cruise home, on the Queen Elizabeth, as an opportunity to relax, they lost no time in recording

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