The First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC ( commonly shortened to First Draft ) was an incomplete 101-page document written by John von Neumann and distributed on June 30, 1945 by Herman Goldstine, security officer on the classified ENIAC project.

During their visit they met Herman Goldstine, one of the original developers of ENIAC, the first general-purpose electronic computer ( although it had no stored program ).

* Goldstine, Herman and Adele Goldstine, The Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer ( ENIAC ), 1946 ( reprinted in The Origins of Digital Computers: Selected Papers, Springer-Verlag, New York, 1982, pp. 359 – 373 )

Herman Heine Goldstine ( September 13, 1913 – June 16, 2004 ) was a mathematician and computer scientist, who was one of the original developers of ENIAC, the first of the modern electronic digital computers.

It is quite conventional in principle in past and present computing machines of the most varied types, e. g. desk multipliers, standard IBM counters, more modern relay machines, the ENIAC " ( Goldstine and von Neumann, 1946 ; p. 98 in Bell and Newell 1971 ).

The programming of the stored program for ENIAC was done by Betty Jennings, Clippinger and Adele Goldstine.

Goldstine, Mauchly, J. Presper Eckert and Arthur Burks began to study the development of the new machine in the hopes of correcting the deficiencies of the ENIAC.

Goldstine discusses his experiences with the ENIAC computer during World War II.

On June 30, 1945, before ENIAC was made, mathematician John von Neumann distributed the paper entitled First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC.

* Burks, Arthur W. and Alice R. Burks, The ENIAC: The First General-Purpose Electronic Computer ( in Annals of the History of Computing, Vol.

ENIAC: The Triumphs and Tragedies of the World's First Computer.

Eckert, a co-inventor of ENIAC, discusses its development at the University of Pennsylvania's Moore School of Electrical Engineering ; describes difficulties in securing patent rights for ENIAC and the problems posed by the circulation of John von Neumann's 1945 First Draft of the Report on EDVAC, which placed the ENIAC inventions in the public domain.

Eckert, a co-inventor of the ENIAC, discusses its development at the University of Pennsylvania's Moore School of Electrical Engineering ; describes difficulties in securing patent rights for the ENIAC and the problems posed by the circulation of John von Neumann's 1945 First Draft of the Report on EDVAC, which placed the ENIAC inventions in the public domain.

Eckert and Mauchly and the other ENIAC designers were joined by John von Neumann in a consulting role ; von Neumann summarized and discussed logical design developments in the 1945 First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC.

The ENIAC patent, issued in 1964 was filed on June 26, 1947, and granted February 4, 1964, but the public disclosure of design details of EDVAC in the First Draft ( which were also common to ENIAC ) was later cited as one cause for the 1973 invalidation of the ENIAC patent.

Eckert, a co-inventor of the ENIAC, discusses its development at the University of Pennsylvania's Moore School of Electrical Engineering ; describes difficulties in securing patent rights for the ENIAC and the problems posed by the circulation of John von Neumann's 1945 First Draft of the Report on EDVAC, which placed the ENIAC inventions in the public domain.

In one of these cycles, ENIAC could write a number to a register, read a number from a register, or add / subtract two numbers.

A number of improvements were also made to ENIAC after 1948, including a primitive read-only stored programming mechanism using the Function Tables as program ROM, an idea included in ENIAC patent and proposed independently by Dr. Richard Clippinger of the BRL.

It was during this short tenure that the Lehmers ran some of the first test programs on the ENIAC — according to their academic interests, these tests involved number theory, especially sieve methods, but also pseudorandom number generation.

Eckert and Mauchly's agreement with the University of Pennsylvania was that Eckert and Mauchly retained the patent rights to the ENIAC but the University could license it to the government and non-profit organizations.

Penn's educational innovations include: the nation's first medical school in 1765 ; the first university teaching hospital in 1874 ; the Wharton School, the world's first collegiate school of business, in 1881 ; the first American student union building, Houston Hall, in 1896 ; the country's second school of veterinary medicine ; and the home of ENIAC, the world's first electronic, large-scale, general-purpose digital computer in 1946.

( Such tests were run without cost, since the ENIAC would have been left powered on anyway in the interest of minimizing vacuum tube failures.

In spite of disappointment that ENIAC had not contributed to the war effort, interest remained strong in the Army to develop an electronic computer.

This approach was made possible by his access to computers: ENIAC at Aberdeen, a new computer, MANIAC, at Princeton, and its twin, which was under construction at Los Alamos.

A contract was awarded for Moore School's construction of the proposed computing machine, which would be named ENIAC, and Eckert was made the project's chief engineer.

ENIAC inventors John Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert proposed the EDVAC's construction in August 1944, and design work for the EDVAC commenced before the ENIAC was fully operational.

The ENIAC design was frozen in 1944 to allow construction.

Wilkes obtained a copy of John von Neumann's prepress description of the EDVAC, a successor to the ENIAC under construction by Presper Eckert and John Mauchly at the Moore School of Electrical Engineering.

During his tenure the Moore School built the ENIAC, the first general-purpose electronic digital computer, and began construction on its successor machine, the EDVAC.

This overcame a severe limitation of ENIAC, which was the considerable time and effort required to reconfigure the computer to perform a new task.

To support this expansion memory, ENIAC was equipped with a new Function Table selector, a memory address selector, pulse-shaping circuits, and three new orders were added to the programming mechanism.

Hartree's fourth and final major contribution to British computing started in early 1947 when the catering firm of J. Lyons & Co. in London heard of the ENIAC and sent a small team in the summer of that year to study what was happening in the USA, because they felt that these new computers might be of assistance in the huge amount of administrative and accounting work which the firm had to do.

The 1946 ENIAC had more tubes than the SSEC and was faster in some operations, but was originally less flexible, needing to be rewired for each new problem.

After building the ENIAC at the University of Pennsylvania, Eckert and Mauchly formed EMCC to build new computer designs for commercial and military applications.

J. Presper Eckert and John W. Mauchly similarly were not aware of the details of Babbage's Analytical Engine work prior to the completion of their design for the first electronic general-purpose computer, the ENIAC.

At that time, the ENIAC was considered to be the first computer in the modern sense, but in 1973 a U. S. District Court invalidated the ENIAC patent and concluded that the ENIAC inventors had derived the subject matter of the electronic digital computer from Atanasoff ( see Patent dispute ).

The first electronic programmable digital computer, the ENIAC, using thousands of octal-base radio vacuum tubes, could perform simple calculations involving 20 numbers of ten decimal digits which were held in the vacuum tube accumulators.

* 1946 – ENIAC, the first electronic general-purpose computer, is formally dedicated at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia.

Digital electronic computers like the ENIAC spelled the end for most analog computing machines, but hybrid analog computers, controlled by digital electronics, remained in substantial use into the 1950s and 1960s, and later in some specialized applications.

The US-built ENIAC ( Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer ) was the first electronic general-purpose computer.

A " program " on the ENIAC, however, was defined by the states of its patch cables and switches, a far cry from the stored program electronic machines that came later.

Among them are the first general purpose electronic computer ( ENIAC ), the Rubella and Hepatitis B vaccines, Retin-A, cognitive therapy, conjoint analysis and others.

After the war, development continued with tube-based computers including, military computers ENIAC and Whirlwind, the Ferranti Mark 1 ( the first commercially available electronic computer ), and UNIVAC I, also available commercially.

Below title bar: events after World War II: From left to right: The Declaration of the State of Israel in 1948 ; The Nuremberg Trials were held after the war, in which the prominent members of the political, military, and economic leadership of the defeated Nazi Germany were prosecuted ; After the war, the United States carried out the Marshall Plan, which aimed at rebuilding Western Europe ; ENIAC, the world's first general-purpose electronic computer .| 420px | thumb

ENIAC, the first general-purpose electronic computer.

** Assembly of the world's first general purpose electronic computer, the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer ( ENIAC ), is completed.

** ENIAC ( for " Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer "), an early general-purpose electronic computer, is unveiled at the University of Pennsylvania.

Late in the war, under the sponsorship of von Neumann, Frankel and Metropolis began to carry out calculations on the first general-purpose electronic computer, the ENIAC.

ENIAC (; Electronic Numerical Integrator And Computer ) was the first electronic general-purpose computer.

ENIAC combined full, Turing complete programmability with electronic speed.

For a variety of reasons ( including Mauchly's June 1941 examination of the Atanasoff – Berry Computer, prototyped in 1939 by John Atanasoff and Clifford Berry ), US patent 3, 120, 606 for ENIAC, granted in 1964, was voided by the 1973 decision of the landmark federal court case Honeywell v. Sperry Rand, putting the invention of the electronic digital computer in the public domain and providing legal recognition to Atanasoff as the inventor of the first electronic digital computer.

With John Mauchly he invented the first general-purpose electronic digital computer ( ENIAC ), presented the first course in computing topics ( the Moore School Lectures ), founded the first commercial computer company ( the Eckert – Mauchly Computer Corporation ), and designed the first commercial computer in the U. S., the UNIVAC, which incorporated Eckert's invention of the mercury delay line memory.

John William Mauchly ( August 30, 1907 – January 8, 1980 ) was an American physicist who, along with J. Presper Eckert, designed ENIAC, the first general purpose electronic digital computer, as well as EDVAC, BINAC and UNIVAC I, the first commercial computer made in the United States.