Out On Their Own, 1946-1951|
As if the other controversies were not enough, Mauchly and Eckert were forced to resign
from the Moore School not long after the public announcement of the ENIAC. While in
the 1990s it would be unthinkable for a university not to have a well-developed patent
policy, this was the case at the University of Pennsylvania in the 1940s. The university
did have a general policy barring its faculty from obtaining private patents based on
university research. But the ENIAC was supported through military funds and not
through the university's own resources. Given this ambiguity, Dean Harold Pender of the
Moore School made a special allowance for Mauchly and Eckert to apply independently
for the ENIAC patent. After World War II the military demanded all academic
institutions seeking research contracts to have uniform patent policies, so the University
demanded that Mauchly and Eckert turn their patent rights back over to the University.
Having done the work of filing the patent themselves, Mauchly and Eckert were not about
to oblige. This decision ultimately led to their resignations, effective 31 March 1946.
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| Mauchly and Eckert ultimately formed the Electronic Controls Company in downtown
Philadelphia. Eckert assumed the task of designing a new computer system, more or less
along the lines laid out in von Neumann's report. Mauchly, meanwhile, took on the
more general task of identifying the uses of electronic computers. This duty was
important, because as a private venture the Electronic Controls Company had to sell its
machines if it were to survive.
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 Flow chart showing UNIVAC's operation. (click to expand to 110k) |
 Cover illustration on UNIVAC brochure. (click to expand to 55k) |
The company's first client was the U.S. Census Bureau. Mauchly
recognized that the decennial census was but four years away and reasoned that he could
sell a computer to the Census Bureau as a way of reducing its costs for tabulating its
immense volume of data. As it turns out, the Census was attracted more to the speed
rather than the economies afforded by the proposed new computer. Increasingly,
manufacturers and government policy makers were seeking timely information about the
national economy. The Census Bureau had expanded its operations to collect relevant
data, but its processing capabilities were more limited, particularly when it involved some
of the newer statistical sampling techniques. |
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Given the great concerns for postwar
economic recovery, Mauchly found the Census Bureau very receptive to his proposals.
The result was a contract, placed under the administration of the National Bureau of
Standards, to have the Electronic Controls Company deliver a large-scale electronic
computer. This work proceeded as the company was officially incorporated as the Eckert-
Mauchly Computer Corporation (EMCC) in December of 1948.
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