Eckert, John Presper Jr (1919-1995)

US electronics engineer and mathematician who collaborated with John Mauchly on the development of the early ENIAC (1946) and UNIVAC 1 (1951) computers. Eckert was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and studied at the University of Pennsylvania. During World War II he worked on radar ranging systems and then turned to the design of calculating devices, building the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Calculator (ENIAC) with Mauchly. The Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation, formed 1947, was incorporated in Remington Rand 1950 and subsequently came under the control of the Sperry Rand Corporation. The ENIAC weighed many tonnes and lacked a memory, but could store a limited amount of information and perform mathematical functions. It was used for calculating ballistic firing tables and for meteorological and research problems. ENIAC was superseded by BINAC, also designed in part by Eckert, and in the early 1950s, Eckert's group began to produce computers for the commercial market with the construction of the UNIVAC 1. Its chief advance was the capacity to store programs.