SOComputing Published 2020-11-28 11:45:36
I've usually started these discussions of past computer systems by telling how I met John Mauchly at the University of Pennsylvania and how I worked on the Vannevar Bush-type Differential Analyzer-of which we had an improved copy at the University of Pennsylvania. Also about how the Ballistics Research Laboratory, due to "soft" or "springy" ground problems in Africa, and a bunch of other peculiar circumstances involving guns, airplanes, and gun directors tremendously increased, by factors of ten or more, the computing load of that time.
This led John and me to propose what was later to be a 30-ton monster, the ENIAC, to the government to help ease the situation. As a practical matter, the 30-ton monster wasn't completed in time for World War II; and 300 additional people, mostly women, were trained to handle the load. Working with Dr. Weygant and Bill Koch, we got the differential analyzer to work about ten times faster and about ten times more accurately than it had worked before. In addition to the differential analyzer at the University of Pennsylvania, there was an identical machine at the Ballistics Research Laboratory at Aberdeen, Maryland, whose improvement was also the responsibility of the University of Pennsylvania.
https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?arnumber=1647246
