On this day in 1907 American physicist John Mauchly was born. John Mauchly is most known for designing the ENIAC, the first general purpose electronic digital computer, alongside electrical engineer James Presper Eckert.
John Mauchly was born in Cincinnati, Ohio and earned his PhD in physics at John Hopkins University. He began teaching in Ursinus College in 1933 before he went to a summer course at the University of Pennsylvania’s Moore School of Electrical Engineering. It was there he met Eckert, with whom he formed a long-standing working partnership. At the time the school was a center for wartime computing, and in 1942 Mauchly wrote a memo proposing the building of a general-purpose electronic computer which helped the school win a contract for the ENIAC. Mauchly was later hired as an instructor of that same school, and went on to design the successors of ENIAC: EDVAC, BINAC and UNIVAC I.
John Mauchly died on January 8, 1980.
John Mauchly – Image taken from history-computer.com