John Mauchly

John Mauchly
Born(1907-08-30)August 30, 1907
DiedJanuary 8, 1980(1980-01-08) (aged 72)
Alma materJohns Hopkins University
Known forENIAC, UNIVAC, Mauchly's sphericity test
AwardsHarry H. Goode Memorial Award (1966)
Harold Pender Award (1973)
IEEE Emanuel R. Piore Award (1978)
Scientific career
FieldsPhysics
InstitutionsUrsinus College
University of Pennsylvania

John William Mauchly (/ˈmɔːkli/ MAWK-lee; August 30, 1907 – January 8, 1980) was an American physicist who, along with J. Presper Eckert, designed ENIAC, the first general-purpose electronic digital computer, as well as EDVAC, BINAC and UNIVAC I, the first commercial computer made in the United States.

Together, Mauchly and Eckert started the first computer company, the Eckert–Mauchly Computer Corporation (EMCC), which allowed them to further the development of fundamental computer concepts originally conceived by members of the 1945-46 ENIAC programming team, notably Jean Bartik and Kay McNulty, including subroutines, nesting, and the first low-level assembler. They also popularized the concept of the stored program, which was formalized in John von Neumann's widely-read First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC (1945) and disseminated through the Moore School Lectures (1946). These publications influenced an explosion of computer development around the world in the late 1940s.