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Vol. 24:2 ISSN 0160-8460 August 1996
ENIAC Project Gets Attention
An NHPRC-supported project to preserve records relating to the early history of the computer has been receiving notice from historians, computer professionals, and even the White House. The records in question were assembled in the late 1960s and early 1970s as trial exhibits in Honeywell v. Sperry Rand, a lawsuit that sought to determine who owned the patent rights to the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer (ENIAC). The Commission awarded a grant in February to three collaborating institutions - the University of Pennsylvania, the Hagley Museum and Library in Wilmington, Delaware, and the Minneapolis-based Charles Babbage Institute for the History of Information Processing - for a project to microfilm the deteriorating photocopies of trial exhibits held by the three institutions. The originals have been lost, and no institution has a complete set.
The ENIAC was developed by John Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert at the University of Pennsylvania's Moore School of Electrical Engineering during World War II. This year marks the 50th anniversary of the ENIAC, and the celebration is focusing new attention on the ENIAC records, recognized as the most significant documentation in the United States of the early history of the electronic digital computer. Vice President Al Gore attended the opening ceremony of a projected 18- month anniversary celebration at the University of Pennsylvania on February 14. As part of the kick-off, the Vice President flipped a switch to restart one of the ENIAC's original decade counters.
An article about the development of the ENIAC appeared in the March issue of The Pennsylvania Gazette. Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility, a nonprofit organization headquartered in Palo Alto, California, has established an online discussion list devoted to gathering information from early computer professionals about the evolution of computing (See the Web site at http://memex.org/community-memory.html. The group has expressed a particular interest in the memoirs of people who played a role in the Army's use of the ENIAC in the 1940s.
ENIAC Computer, 1947. Courtesy The University of Pennsylvania Archives.
The records that document the history of the ENIAC, dating from 1936 to 1970, would most likely have been lost had the issue of who owned the rights to electronic digital computer technology not wound up in court in an infringement and antitrust suit. The lawsuit produced thousands of pages describing the history of the computer industry in the United States, as lawyers for Honeywell and Sperry Rand traveled the country collecting documents as part of the discovery procedure. After the trial, both companies realized that the collections they had assembled had unusual historical significance. In 1983, Sperry deposited its collection with the Hagley Museum and Library. The next year, Honeywell placed its collection at the Charles Babbage Institute. The University of Pennsylvania acquired a set of exhibits as an interested party. The original set from the District Court was sent to the National Archives and Records Administration's Federal Records Center in Chicago, where it was later destroyed. Of historical note, no damages or court costs were awarded to either party of the dispute. The trial judge determined that the true inventor was John Vincent Atanasoff, an Iowa State University professor of mathematics who had experimented with an early prototype of a digital computer in the late 1930s.
Total ENIAC holdings of the project participants comprise 164 cubic feet. The trial transcript is already on microfiche and available on interlibrary loan. NHPRC funding will be used to produce a definitive microfilm edition of the plaintiff, defendant, and deposition exhibits, thus preserving the information in an archivally acceptable format and making the information more widely available to researchers. Project staff are collating the holdings of the three institutions to compile a record set of the most complete and legible copies. Staff will also create an index to the exhibits to make them accessible by subject, personal name, and corporate name. The master set will then be microfilmed and the original documents rehoused in acid-neutral boxes and folders. The new research collection should be available by mid-1998. The grantees plan to seek corporate funding to convert the microfilm to optical digital format so that the collection can be made available electronically.
The NHPRC is proud to assist in the preservation of this historically significant collection. More information about the ENIAC project can be obtained from Project Director Mark Lloyd, the University of Pennsylvania Archives, (215) 898-7024; Co-Director Michael Nash, Hagley Museum and Library, (302) 658- 2400; or Co-Director Bruce Bruemmer, Charles Babbage Institute Archives (612) 624-5050.
