ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator And Computer) was designed during World War II by J. Presper Eckert and John Mauchly at the University of Pennsylvania for the United States Army. It was the forerunner of Eckert and Mauchly's UNIVAC, which was the first widely-available commercial computer. Because of the war, the University of Pennsylvania's Moore School of Engineering had a contract with the United States Army to design an advanced machine that could perform military-related calculations, such as cannon trajectories. The machine, which came to be called ENIAC, was needed quickly, and the design team decided to use available materials and technology, such as vacuum tube processors and punched cards to store the program and data. In 1941 when the project began, John Mauchly was a physicist who had recently joined the faculty and Presper Eckert was an engineering student. Also on the team was Arthur Burks (1915-), a mathematician...