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Thomas Haigh, Mark Priestley, and Crispin Rope, ENIAC in Action: Making and Remaking the Modern Computer. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2016. 366 pp. ISBN: 9780262033985.

When the ENIAC was being built, Philadelphia stood as the third largest manufacturing center in America. It was roughly half the size of Chicago and slightly bigger than the industrial behemoth of Detroit. Yet, its size was somewhat misleading. Philadelphia was a center of consumer radio manufacture. It was home to one of the first radio companies, Atwater Kent, and the largest, Philco. Philco had dominated the industry since 1930 and would remain the largest manufacturer until 1955.

As a research center for the radio industry, Philadelphia was a respectable but secondary player. The major researcher centers were at MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in Princeton, New Jersey, at the Radio Corporation of American and on West Street in New York City at AT&T’s Bell Telephone Laboratories. During the war, the University of Pennsylvania received only 1/40th of the amount of research funds that were given to MIT and 1/6th of that given to Bell Labs. In spite of this, Philadelphia’s university was a major computing center during the war and developed a major piece of computing equipment, the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer or ENIAC. This machine demonstrated the value of electronic computing machinery and started a practical investigation into the concept of a stored program computer.

The broad outline of the ENIAC story is well known. It is a staple of computing history books and of elementary programming texts. The physical remnants of the machine grace technology museums around the globe. Yet the ENIAC has been the subject of remarkably few studies. All the major works in this literature are bedeviled by the question of priority, the question of who deserves credit for the machine.

The first of these books, The Computer from Pascal to von Neumann (Princeton University Press 1972), was written by a participant in the project, the mathematician Herman Goldstine. Goldstine does a good job of connecting the machine to earlier works on systematic computation, including the machines of Charles Babbage, the computing projects of the First World War, the [End Page 80] experiments of L.J. Comrie, and the mathematical work of Alan Turing. However, Goldstine insists on identifying John von Neumann, which drew the ire of others associated with the project.

Goldstine’s book was followed by From ENIAC to UNIVAC: An Appraisal of the Eckert-Mauchly Computers (Digital Press 1981) by Nancy Stern, who once served as an editor of this periodical. Stern traces the work of two members of the ENIAC team, John Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert. Eckert and Mauchly designed four machines: the ENIAC, the BINAC, the EDVAC (constructed by others), and the commercial Univac I. The book gives a good technical discussion of the ENIAC but also got stuck in the issue of priority. According to its Annals reviewer, the book did not “find the means to make a final resolution.”

Scott McCartney wrote ENIAC, The Triumphs and Tragedies of the World’s First Computer (Walker Press 1999), more than 50 years after the construction of the ENIAC. He argued that the project had been forgotten by a public that had come to view Bill Gates and Steve Jobs as computer pioneers. In attempting to correct the record, he argued that Eckert and Mauchly were the true creators of the computer.

Alice Burk’s Who Invented the Computer? The Legal Battle That Changed Computing History (Prometheus Books 2003) provides a surprising technical discussion of the ENIAC and its operation. However, it is a book written to establish the claim of John Atanasoff to be the inventor of the computer. The book is polemical and scornful. It is also the last book to be written by someone with a direct connection to the project. Burk’s husband, Arthur, worked alongside Eckert and Mauchly on the ENIAC project.

The book ENIAC in Action, by Thomas Haigh, Mark Priestley, and Crispin Rope (MIT Press 2016), represents an important contribution to the ENIAC literature. The title really describes only one aspect of...

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