PENNPRINTOUT
VOLUME 12:4 MARCH 1996
February 14, 1946: The birth of the information age
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Front cover: Public announcement of ENIAC, 1946.
From left: J. Presper Eckert, Chief Engineer;
Prof. J. G. Brainerd, project supervisor;
Sam Feltman, Chief Engineer for Ballistics, Ordnance Dept.;
Captain H. H. Goldstine, Liaison Officer;
Dr. J. W. Mauchly, Consulting Engineer;
Dean Harold Pender, Moore School of Electrical Engineering;
General G. M. Barnes, Chief, Ordnance R&D Service;
Colonel Paul N. Gillon, Chief, Research Branch, ORDS.
(Photo: John Mauchly Papers, Dept. of Special Collections,
University of Pennsylvania Library)
Below: Detail of the circuit design for the accumulator
sections of the ENIAC II chip (see page 7).
Back cover: Test fabrication of the accumulator sections
of the ENIAC II chip. The actual test chip (center)
measures less than a quarter of an inch square.
PENNPRINTOUT
Judy Smith, managing editor
Randall Couch, art direction
Teresa Leo, design
Celeste Stewart, design
Edda Katz, editing
Caroline Ferguson, editing
features
3
a golden anniversary
Gregory C. Farrington and Peter C. Patton toast ENIAC
4
abacus to eniac
Highlights in the history of computing
7
eniac-on-a-chip
Jan van der Spiegel cuts 30 tons down to size
8
crackpot notions
Dilys Winegrad tells the story of ENIAC
12
john w. mauchly: the man and the machine
Michael T. Ryan on the Penn Library’s exhibition
15
eniac golden anniversary events
Highlights for February and March
16
a birthday card to eniac
A gallery of greetings
18
cybersociety 2046
Jill Maser asks students about computing’s next 50 years
22
eniac‘s recessive gene
Mitch Marcus and Atsushi Akera on ENIAC’s progeny
Penn Printout is published by
Information Systems and Computing
University of Pennsylvania
Harnwell House, Suite 211
3820 Locust Walk
Philadelphia, PA 19104-6134
Send e-mail to: printout@isc.upenn.edu
Penn Printout Online contains the electronic
versions of Penn Printout and includes
archives dating back to September 1991:
http://www.upenn.edu/pennprintout/
24
jack
Norman I. Badler animates a model virtual employee
26
media power
John MacDermott finds new technology in education
departments
21
announcements
28
electronic calendar
30
random bits
31
q&a
Printed on acid-free, recycled paper.
Please recycle this issue.
2
PENNPRINTOUT
golden
a golden
anniversary
BY GREGORY C. FARRINGTON AND PETER C. PATTON
V
alentine’s Day 1996 marks the 50th anniversary
of the ENIAC, the world’s first general-purpose
electronic computer, created at the Moore
School of Electrical Engineering at the University of
Pennsylvania. Many historians
date the beginning of the information age to the hushed moment when the ENIAC’s 18,000
vacuum tubes first began to glow.
The subsequent history of
computing parallels the history
of printing. The development of
the rotary press in the early 1800s,
some 300 years after Gutenberg
invented moveable type, made
inexpensive printing possible and
gave birth to the great information age of print. Literacy rates
rose dramatically, and universal
education became economically
feasible.
What took centuries for
printing took only a few decades
for the computer. By the early
1980s, miniaturization had made
possible powerful, inexpensive
desktop computers. Only a decade ago, computers made the
transition from machines for
computation to machines for
communication. Desktop computers have become inexpensive
telecommunications centers, transmitting data, print, sound,
and video around the world.
When George Orwell created his nightmare vision,
1984, new communications tools were feared as instruments for enslavement. Now they are more frequently
seen as engines of freedom. Many argue that the Berlin
Wall fell and the governments in Eastern Europe and the
Soviet Union collapsed because of fax machines and
PCs. With these new technologies it is no longer possible
to wall out information and isolate people. Politically
and economically computers have become the revolutionary artillery of the 21st century.
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Now a global economy is developing, made possible
by rapid, computer-based telecommunications. Similarly
politics, health care delivery, and the structure of the
corporation are being transformed as the information age
gathers momentum.
How we educate and learn
is also changing. When
information can be anywhere
and everywhere, instantly, and
students and faculty can
interact wherever they might
be, not just in the classroom,
the stage is set for a transformation in how students learn
and how schools serve society.
Technology gave us the
“information society.”
Humans can now create a
more democratic “learning
society” in which information
access and a quality education
will increasingly become
available to all. The richest
information resources from
the largest libraries can be
brought to the middle of the
smallest town. Computers do
not care if you are witty,
handsome, rich or poor, black
or white—or live in the center
of New York or the middle of
Peru. You can be connected to
the world, learn and teach, run a business, make money or
lose it, or just talk to colleagues and friends around the
world.
The real revolution the ENIAC created is not one of
numbers and bytes, but one in which people, regardless of
geography and politics, can communicate with and learn
from each other. The computer has become a tool of
personal liberation, and the revolution has only begun.
GREGORY C. FARRINGTON is Dean, School of Engineering and Applied Science; PETER C. PATTON is Vice
Provost, Office of Information Systems and Computing.
33
abacus
to
eniac
highlights in the history of computing
From ancient times, people have
used digital devices as computational aids. Fingers and toes, the
quintessential digital devices,
gradually gave way to sticks and
pebbles. Stone counters, used by
the Greeks before 450 B.C., were
an early form of abacus that the
Romans adopted around 50 B.C.
and which later developed into
the medieval European counting
board. Some of the highlights
along the road that led to the
ENIAC are listed here; the
chronology is based on material
in Landmarks in Digital Computing: A Smithsonian Pictorial
History by Peggy A. Kidwell and
Paul E. Ceruzzi (1994).
4
1300
The abacus, using beads strung on wires and mounted in a
frame, was in widespread use in China.
1500
The quipu, a system of knotted strings, was in extensive use by
Peruvian Incas.
1614
John Napier described logarithms.
1617
Napier described his calculating rods, or “bones,” in a book
published the year he died.
1623
Wilhelm Schickard, in a letter to Johannes Kepler, gave the first
known description of an automatic adding machine.
1642
Blaise Pascal invented an adding machine; it is the oldest
surviving example of a true adding machine where tens carry.
1673
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz’s calculator mechanized multiplication as well as addition.
1803
Joseph Marie Jacquard began work on an automatic loom that
used punched cards to control the manufacturing process.
1822
Charles Babbage completed a model of the difference engine, a
device that linked adding and subtracting mechanisms to one
another to calculate the values of more complex mathematical
functions.
1834
Babbage turned from construction of the difference engine to a
far more ambitious analytical engine: a machine that embodied
in its design most of the features of a modern digital computer.
1843
Ada Augusta, Countess of Lovelace, published a description of
Babbage’s analytical engine that incorporated many of the
concepts of modern computer programming.
1851
Victor Schilt exhibited a key-driven adding machine at the
Crystal Palace Exposition in London.
1853
The Scheutz difference engine, the world’s first printing
calculator, was completed.
1854
George Boole published Laws of Thought, which led to what
would be called Boolean algebra. His rules for manipulating
logical expressions would be adopted by computer designers as
the basis for the electronic circuits or “logic” of computers.
1879
James and John Ritty patented a cash register.
1884
John H. Patterson and his associates acquired the Ritty patents
and established National Cash Register Company (NCR).
1885
Dorr Felt constructed the “macaroni box” prototype for his keydriven adding machine.
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1890
Hollerith punched-card equipment was used in the U.S. census.
1891
William S. Burroughs began commercial manufacture of his
printing adding machine.
1893
The Millionaire calculator, introduced in Switzerland, allowed
direct multiplication by any digit and was used by government
agencies and scientists, especially astronomers, well into the
20th century.
1911
Charles Flint founded the Computing-Tabulating-Recording
Company (C-T-R), which produced and sold electronic Hollerith tabulating equipment, time clocks, and other business
machinery. James Powers began manufacturing a mechanical
punched-card system that competed with Hollerith’s. His
machines eventually were made and sold by the RemingtonRand Corporation.
1917- At Aberdeen Proving Ground, in Maryland, mathematical
1918 techniques for computing and printing firing tables for new
types of advanced ordnance used in WWI were developed.
1918
Charles Kettering developed the Kettering Bug—an unmanned
flying bomb guided by internal gyroscopes.
1919
Early versions of the Enigma cipher machine were built in
Europe.
1924
Thomas Watson, President of C-T-R, changed the company’s
name to International Business Machines Corporation.
1928
IBM adopted the 80-column punched card, the standard for the
next 50 years.
1930
Vannevar Bush of MIT developed the differential analyzer, a
large analog computer.
1936
Alan Turing, a British mathematician, published “On Computable Numbers...,” a description of a “machine” that could in
principle solve any mathematical problem presented to it in
symbolic form. His proof of the feasibility of building a
“general purpose machine” provided the theoretical basis for
modern computer software.
1937
George Stibitz, a research mathematician at Bell Telephone
Laboratories, built a binary adder out of a few light bulbs,
batteries, and wire on his kitchen table. His Model K (for
“kitchen”) demonstrated the feasibility of mechanizing binary
arithmetic.
1938
Claude Shannon of MIT showed in theory what Stibitz had
demonstrated with the
(continued on next page)
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5
Model K: that the two-valued algebra developed by George
Boole could be implemented electrically by telephone relays.
Konrad Zuse, a German mechanical engineer, began building a
mechanical computer in his parents’ Berlin apartment. Independently of Shannon, he developed a form of symbolic logic to
assist in the design of the binary circuits.
6
1939
The World’s Fair in New York featured many exhibits showing
the promise of technology. Among them were Electro, a robot
man that exhibited simple intelligence. J.V. Atanasoff began
work on an electronic computer at Iowa State University.
George Stibitz and Samuel Williams of Bell Labs completed the
Complex Number Computer (later known as the Bell Labs
Model I), which used telephone relays and coded decimal
numbers as groups of four binary digits each.
1940
Stibitz demonstrated the Bell Labs Model I at Dartmouth
College, with a terminal in New Hampshire and the Model I in
New York. Twenty years later Dartmouth would become a
center for time-sharing and remote use of computers.
1941
Within a few days of America’s entry into WWII, Konrad Zuse
demonstrated a working, programmable calculator to German
military authorities. His Z3 used surplus telephone relays and
was programmed by holes punched into discarded 35mm movie
film.
1942
J. Presper Eckert and John W. Mauchly, of the University of
Pennsylvania, proposed an electronic version of the Bush
differential analyzer for the Army, which would operate
digitally instead of by analog means. The proposal led to the
creation of the ENIAC.
1943
Electromechanical Bombes were built in Britan and the U.S. to
decipher German messages encrypted by Enigma.
1944
The first of several Colossus machines was completed in
Britain, using vacuum tubes instead of relay circuits to decipher
German messages. The ASCC, also known as the Harvard
Mark I, was unveiled at Cruft Laboratory in Cambridge,
Massachusetts.
1945
The ENIAC was completed and tested at the Moore School of
Electrical Engineering, University of Pennsylvania. Konrad
Zuse completed the Z4, a large electromechanical programmable machine, shortly before VE-day (May 8). The “First
Draft of a Report on the EDVAC,” by John von Neumann,
summarized discussions at the Moore School concerning the
proposed successor to the ENIAC. Von Neumann’s reputation
as a world-class mathematician, as well as his description of the
EDVAC in symbolic rather than engineering terms, helped win
widespread acceptance of this design.
1946
February 14: The public unveiling of the ENIAC took place in
Philadelphia. Summer: A series of lectures on the “Theory and
Techniques for Design of Electronic Digital Computers” was
given at the Moore School. The course led to widespread
adoption of the EDVAC-type design, including stored programs,
for nearly all subsequent computer development.
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ENIAC-on-a-Chip
BY JAN VAN DER SPIEGEL
T
ake the ENIAC, an 80 by 3 foot giant, and shrink
it to fit a silicon chip the size of your fingernail.
Place the chip on a tiny circuit board. Connect
the circuit board to a PC running graphical software
simulating the ENIAC’s look and feel. This is the recipe
that students and faculty at the School of Engineering
and Applied Science—with support from the National
Science Foundation and Atmel Corporation—are using to
create the ENIAC-on-a-Chip Kit, a teaching tool that
dramatically illustrates the performance improvements
brought about by semiconductor technology.
The chip preserves the ENIAC’s original architecture
and basic circuit building blocks as much as possible. To
recreate the giant computer using modern technology, the
ENIAC’s 18,000 vacuum tubes and 170,000 resistors
were modeled with 250,000 tiny transistors, mechanical
switches were replaced with electronic ones, and digit
and programming trunks were implemented as tiny metal
lines interconnected through cross-point switches. The
chip performs the same functions that its 30-ton predecessor pioneered 50 years ago. ENIAC-on-a-Chip
includes the following units:
• 20 accumulators—the arithmetic workhorses, which
also serve as memory elements
• constant transmitter—the module that allows initialization of the accumulators to a constant integer
• cycling unit—the master clock that synchronizes the
operation of all modules
• initiation unit—the element that tells all modules when
to start computation
• function table—the module that gives arbitrary
functional dependence for the input
• master programmer—the higher level arithmetic
coordinator that allows more sophisticated programming of the chip
• high-speed multiplier—the module that manipulates
the accumulators to perform multiplication
• divider—the module that manipulates the accumulators
to perform division
• square rooter—the module that manipulates the
accumulators to perform square roots
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The chip, fabricated in a technology whose smallest
features are .8 micrometers, is due back from the silicon
foundry in mid-April. Following is a comparison between
the ENIAC and ENIAC-on-a-Chip:
Vacuum tubes
Transistors
Resistors
Capacitors
Footprint
Clock speed
Power
ENIAC
ENIAC-on-a Chip
18,000
none
170,000
10,000
80x3 ft
100 kHz
174 kW
none
250,000
none
none
8x8 mm
20 MHz*
0.5 W*
*estimated
Once back from the foundry, the chip will be mounted
on a small, printed circuit board and connected to a PC.
The PC will be equipped with a graphical interface that
allows a user to interact with the chip. The interface will
display the front panels of the the ENIAC with its programming switches, control switches, and interconnection
cables (digit lines and programming lines). The user will
select the switches to generate the proper program settings
and interconnections to create a data file. The file will be
sent to the chip and the output of the chip (lights indicating
the output of the accumulators) will be read back into the
PC for display, allowing the user to evaluate results.
The ENIAC-on-a-Chip Kit, consisting of chip, printed
circuit board, PC software, and a set of demonstration
programs (data files), will be available to a variety of
organizations and institutions, including the National
Science Foundation and the Smithsonian. The multidimensional educational and intellectual benefits of the kit
will not only inspire students in engineering and science
but will reach out to a larger audience ranging from
historians to high school students and the public at large.
For more information about ENIAC-on-a-Chip, the
Kit, and the student and faculty developers, see http://
www.ee.upenn.edu/~jan/eniacproj.html.
JAN VAN DER SPIEGEL is Professor of Electrical
Engineering at the School of Engineering and Applied
Science.
7
crackpot notions
the story of
ENIAC
BY DILYS WINEGRAD
O
n February 14, 1946, The New York Times
announced the unveiling of “an amazing
machine which applies electronic speeds for the
first time to mathematical tasks hitherto too difficult and
cumbersome for solution.” “Leaders who saw the device
in action for the first time,” the report continued, “heralded it as a tool with which to begin to rebuild scientific
affairs on new foundations.” With these prophetic words,
the world’s first large-scale electronic general-purpose
digital computer, developed at the Moore School of
Electrical Engineering at the University of Pennsylvania
in Philadelphia, emerged from the wraps of secrecy
under which it had been constructed in the last years of
World War II.
The Times reporter went on to predict that the advent
of a flexible computer would revolutionize all areas of
science. A great many mathematical models that had
been around for generations were suddenly practical
propositions available for use by engineers and physicists. Once the new invention had been put through its
paces in public, there was widespread interest in seeing
how it worked. In the summer of 1946 an expert
audience attended the famous Moore School Lectures, at
which the speakers constituted a veritable who’s who of
computing. The significance of the ideas was variously
received, some participants remaining less than convinced. Nonetheless, the National Bureau of Standards
was sufficiently persuaded to begin building its own
computers. And Project Whirlwind at the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology finally changed from analog to
digital technology.
Skepticism was by no means confined to proponents
of rival technologies. Banks and insurance companies,
far from grasping the potential of the computer, seem to
have been put off by the notion of turning decisions, even
8
repetitive ones, over to a machine. Adolph Matz, a
Wharton School professor, predicted that “completion of
the first all-electronic general-purpose computing
machine [would open] the future to the development of
business machines heretofore undreamed of . . . and may
well also revolutionize methods and systems of dealing
with everyday business transactions.” But in 1945 his
ideas on applications to commercial enterprise were
dismissed as “too ephemeral,” and his article, “Electronics in Accounting,” was initially rejected by the official
magazine of the Association of Accountants. As John
Maynard Keynes observed, “The difficulty lies not in the
new ideas, but in escaping the old ones.” In this spirit,
Lord Kelvin in 1887 observed that radio had no future,
the telephone was described in 1876 as “only a toy”—
and John Logie Baird was kicked out of an office in 1925
as a possibly dangerous lunatic for claiming to have “a
machine for seeing by radio.”
In the 1940s, however, the nation had been ready for
a breakthrough in computer technology. Not surprisingly, the quantum leap in computer development
occurred during World War II in response to urgent
military needs. During the national emergency, the
Moore School’s differential analyzer—the most sophisticated computing instrument available for scientific use
before the ENIAC—was in constant use working out
ballistic tables. A course in the design of electromechanical instruments had also been instituted at the
School. At any other time the ideas that were elaborated
and put into effect at the University of Pennsylvania
would have been dismissed as interesting, impractical—
and certainly too expensive.
A variety of personnel had arrived at the Moore
School to serve in the war effort. Large numbers of
“human computers”—young women with mathematics
PENNPRINTOUT
degrees, supplemented by other specially trained recruits—were engaged in computing the ballistic tables,
and select students attended the Moore School’s Engineering, Science, Management War Training course
(ESMWT) at government expense. Several PhDs among
them were hired to replace the Penn professors who had
been called up. One of these, John W. Mauchly, who
taught physics at neighboring Ursinus College, had
originally signed up for a course on the theory and design
of computing instruments.
The graduate student responsible for running the lab
associated with the ESMWT course, John Presper Eckert,
Jr., was described at the time as “undoubtedly the best
electronic engineer in the Moore School.” Still in his
early twenties, Eckert had already secured a patent for
recording sound on film. The Navy adopted a device he
had developed to check the effectiveness of magnetic
mine sweeping airplanes. Eckert and Mauchly found
time to chat about the ideas that fascinated both.
Because his primary research interest in meteorology
involved enormous amounts of statistical data, Mauchly
was constantly looking for ways to speed up computation. He had already investigated the use of cold cathode
tubes—much slower than vacuum tubes and with a
poorer margin of safety, but with the advantage that they
dissipated less power and were far more economical. For
his meteorological investigations, he had constructed an
analog device that he named a “harmonic analyzer.”
Eckert soon decided that Mauchly’s ideas on
electronic computation were technically feasible. He
immediately set about applying his engineering ingenuity
and native genius to the problems that would have to be
worked out. Encouraged by Eckert’s receptivity to his
the response that greeted his proposals for developing an
electronic computer. Knowing this, when the American
Association for the Advancement of Science met at Penn
in 1940, Mauchly had opted to deliver his paper on
weather statistics to the physics section. In the audience
was John Atanasoff, a professor from Iowa State University, who, together with his graduate student Clyde Berry,
was at work on an electromechanical rotary dynamic
storage register. Mauchly and Atanasoff discussed their
mutual interests then and on subsequent occasions.
The machine Atanasoff proposed permitted a number
to be added to another number that had previously been
“stored” in the form of electrostatic charges. Designed to
solve a single class of problems, not at electronic speeds,
it had no programming. Like many ingenious inventions,
it was never finished. Although not a computer in any
useful sense, years later when the importance of computers had been fully recognized, this device was adjudged
“prior art” by a Federal court. The decision, which
denied eligibility for patent protection to the Eckert/
Mauchly invention, came in the context of business
interests and a rapidly expanding computer industry.
Before the war, researchers at the Moore School had
used the School’s version of the differential analyzer,
then the largest mechanical computing machine in the
world, to study nonlinear and varying-parameter differential equations. When the Army took over operations in
1942, the Moore School became something of an
extension of the BRL for the remaining war years—an
early model of university/government cooperation. The
human computers working on ballistics using hand-held
calculators came under the supervision of Lieutenant
Herman Goldstine, a young, Chicago-trained
It seems barely credible that scientists, engineers,
and businessmen five scant decades ago did not
grasp the implications of the new technology.
theoretical ideas and spurred by the serious consideration
that they might be implemented, Mauchly wrote a fivepage memo entitled “The Use of Vacuum Tube Devices
in Calculating.” Among other things, he pointed out that
an electronic machine performing 1,000 multiplications
per second would be able to compute complete trajectories in minutes rather than days. This memo became
the basis of the report subsequently submitted by the
Moore School to the Army’s Ballistic Research
Laboratory (BRL).
The meteorological community considered
Mauchly’s theories crackpot notions, which was much
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1996
mathematician stationed at the BRL.
A trajectory that could take up to 40 hours to
calculate using a desktop calculator could be computed in
30 minutes or so on the differential analyzer. But, since
each firing table involved hundreds of trajectories, it
might still require the best part of a month to complete a
table. In 1943 the Allies landed in North Africa, an event
that presented the military with totally new terrain and a
whole new set of problems for operating ordnance. The
growing backlog of firing tables provided the
final impetus for serious experimentation in the field
of computers.
(continued on next page)
99
Aware that the military were more likely than other
government agencies to take a calculated risk in time of
war, Goldstine saw a possible solution to the problems
besetting them in the enthusiastic discussions of electronic digital computing going on at the Moore School.
He briefed his superior at the Aberdeen Proving Ground
in Maryland, and a presentation was arranged at which
Penn Professor John Brainerd submitted a proposal to the
head of the BRL and its chief scientist, Oswald Veblen.
To forestall anticipated skepticism, Brainerd, who
chaired the faculty committee that supervised the
analyzer, proposed an “electronic diff. analyzer,” intentionally associating the proposed computer with the
existing differential analyzer. (As a digital device, the
proposed computer would solve differential equations by
differencing rather than differentiation—a deliberate
double entendre.) The computer described would be able
compute a trajectory in under five minutes. Unlike all
previous models, it would be fully electronic.
After delivering their report the inventors continued
to work around the clock to produce supporting arguments and data and to prepare answers to possible
questions. A few days later, on Eckert’s 24th birthday,
April 9, 1943, they presented a more detailed proposal.
In May agreement was reached, and on June 5 contract
No. W-670-ORD-4926 was signed by the Trustees of the
University of Pennsylvania and the U.S. Army Ordnance
Department with Brainerd as project supervisor, Eckert
as chief engineer, Mauchly as principal consultant, and
Goldstine as technical liaison. The machine was officially named the Electronic Numerical Integrator And
Computer, ever after to be known as ENIAC.
Among the wonders of the “new electronic speed
marvel” reported in The New York Times after the
ENIAC’s demonstration run in February, 1946, was the
absence of any moving mechanical parts associated with
Scenes from the dedication.
The original press release
describing the ENIAC’s
physical aspects and operation; J. Presper Eckert poses
at the console; an invitation
to the dedication ceremonies
and dinner; and the development team and sponsors
(identified on page 2).
Photos: John Mauchly
Papers, Department of
Special Collections, University of Pennsylvania Library.
Documents: University of
Pennsylvania
10 Archives.
the high-speed computational aspects of the machine,
which consisted of “18,000 vacuum tubes and several
miles of wiring.” All prior machines had relied on such
parts to perform their calculations, and these limited their
compactness and reliability, not to mention the speed
with which operations were executed. Astoundingly—
for the time—the ENIAC could perform 5,000 additions
or subtractions or 360 multiplications of two 10-digit
decimal numbers in a second. In the same space of time,
it could call up 1,000 values of a function from function
tables that were included. Problems that would have
taken months of simple hand calculation and hours, even
days, with the help of the differential analyzer could now
be dispatched in minutes.
At a certain stage in its development it became
necessary to “freeze” the classified design in the interest
of completing the project at hand. Nonetheless, as the
end of the war approached, engineers at the Moore
School were beginning to think intensively about
developing a more sophisticated computer. From the
first Mauchly had envisaged a general-purpose machine,
and he continued to work towards its construction.
Eckert proposed ways to overcome what he recognized
as the ENIAC’s major shortcoming: The computer
introduced almost every fundamental hardware concept
of modern computing—with the exception of internally
stored instructions.
The inventors focused on methods to increase the
machine’s memory. Having experimented with acoustic
delay lines earlier on, extrapolating from those developed
by William Shockley at Bell Laboratories, Eckert and his
engineers now investigated the possibility of developing
a mercury delay line suitable for computer memory. For
the time being it was not possible to implement the stored
program they proposed, but the mercury delay line
became an element of the next generation of computers
PENNPRINTOUT
at the Moore School and elsewhere. These included the
EDVAC, the second large computer developed at Penn
and the first in the country to incorporate a stored
memory; the EDSAC developed by Maurice Wilkes in
England; and the computers designed by Mauchly and
Eckert after leaving the Moore School. The concept of
storing the program in the same memory unit as the data
was introduced when the Institute for Advanced Studies
(IAS) computer was built a few years later by a team
headed by John von Neumann. While commuting between Los Alamos and the Institute for Advanced Study
in the last year of the war, von Neumann had participated
in the highly classified discussions at the Moore School.
When it was built, the IAS computer used a so-called
Williams electrostatic storage tube for the memory.
The Moore School team started work on the EDVAC
in late 1944 when the Army Ordnance Department
granted the ENIAC contract a supplement for an improved design. As a stored program device, the Electronic Discrete Variable Automatic Computer (EDVAC)
was the true forebear of all subsequent computing
devices. All of the early computers, including one called
the MANIAC, acknowledged their relationship to the
Moore School computers through their shared suffix.
While the letter “A” had only stood for and in the
Electronic Numeral Integrator and Computer (ENIAC),
in the successor machine—and ever afterwards—it
finally indicated a fully automatic device.
The ENIAC was completed too late to be utilized for
its original purpose of calculating firing and ballistic
tables. Instead, the first task assigned on its test run in
1945 involved the many thousands of computations
connected with top-secret studies on thermonuclear
reactions. While many projects had to be scrapped at the
end of the war, ENIAC was not among them. The
computer had proved to be significant for military
march 1996
research at Los Alamos in the West as well as at the
Ballistic Research Laboratory in the East. Indeed, the
successful simulation of a nuclear blast resulted in the
Federal government’s supporting a nascent computing
technology, soon to spawn a new industry.
Today it is impossible to think of a world without
computers or to imagine that the ideas from which they
developed, and which we now take for granted, might
have been strenuously resisted when they were first
proposed. It may seem barely credible today that
scientists, engineers, and businessmen five scant decades
ago might not have immediately grasped the implications
of the new technology. But this has been the case more
often than not throughout the course of human endeavor;
variations on the theme of “Who needs it?” are quickly
followed by reasons why it can’t be done. Notable
examples range from Nobel laureate Robert Millikan’s
assurances that man could never tap the power of the
atom to Harry M. Warner’s skepticism about the market
for talking movies. As late as the 1950s Britain’s
Astronomer Royal dismissed the notion of space travel as
“utter bilge.”
With the development of the ENIAC at the University of Pennsylvania, the City of Philadelphia acquired a
second site where ideas produced a revolution. Not
unlike Independence Hall, the Moore School provided
surroundings in which abstract theories became reality,
opening paths to new technologies that have changed our
ability to investigate the world and conduct every
transaction imaginable in ways that continue to evolve.
The first operating computer of its sort is justly famed
and a reason for celebration as the events related here
become remote, though hardly ancient, history.
DILYS WINEGRAD is Director/Curator of Arthur Ross
Gallery at the University of Pennsylvania.
11
BY MICHAEL T. RYAN
john w. mauchly
the man and the machine
In Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia, Valentine, a young scientist, muses over a conundrum: “The ordinary-sized stuff which
is our lives, the things people write poetry about – clouds – daffodils – waterfalls – and what happens in a cup of coffee
when the creme goes in – these things are full of mystery, as mysterious to us as the heavens were to the Greeks. We’re
better at predicting events at the edge of the galaxy or inside the nucleus of an atom than whether it’ll rain on auntie’s
garden party three Sundays from now. Because the problem turns out to be different. We can’t even predict the next drip
from a dripping tap when it gets irregular. Each drip sets up the conditions for the next, the smallest variation blows the
prediction apart, and the weather is unpredictable the same way, will always be unpredictable.”
No one would have appreciated the force of Valentine’s remarks more than John W. Mauchly. Attempting to solve
“the problem of the weather” was an issue he wrestled with for a good part of his career. It was one of a number of
projects that fueled his interest in computing machines, and one of several problems that the ENIAC was to have solved.
Yet if the ENIAC could not predict the weather, it could do a lot of other things, enough to earn Mauchly and his
collaborator Presper Eckert a distinguished place in the pantheon of 20th-century scientists and engineers whose work
has made a difference. Mauchly’s career and achievements are the subject of a major exhibition in the Rosenwald
Gallery of the Van Pelt Library, which is being mounted as part of the Year of the Computer activities. Curated by
Atsushi Akera and Asaf Goldschmidt of the Department of the History and Sociology of Science, with assistance from
Dr. Nancy Shawcross, the Library’s Curator of Manuscripts, John W. Mauchly and the Development of the ENIAC
Computer is based primarily on the Mauchly Papers in the Library and on the ENIAC project records in the University
Archives. It presents an intelligent and sympathetic view of the man who designed the world’s first digital electronic
computer and offers a fresh assessment of the nature of his achievement.
The son of a physicist, Mauchly received a PhD in Physics from Johns Hopkins in 1932. Finding an academic
position during the depths of the Depression was not easy, but Mauchly was able to secure an appointment at Ursinus
College, a small liberal arts school outside of Philadelphia. However, Mauchly soon came to realize that conducting
research in a small college was difficult, if not impossible. The annual operating budget of his Physics Department was
around $50! The exhibit pays close attention to Mauchly’s professional development in the years before the war,
12
PENNPRINTOUT
portraying for us a deeply committed and inventive scientist who made a virtue of scarcity. The very absence of equipment,
colleagues, and funding seemed to move him to look for new and faster ways to do the complex and laborious calculations
needed to solve a variety of problems based on accumulating and manipulating larger and larger amounts of data. What was
needed to process the data was a rapid, accurate, multifunctional calculating device.
Mauchly came to the Moore School of Electrical Engineering as an adjunct faculty member to take up the slack left by
those who had joined the war effort. At that time, one of the School’s principal areas of military support research was
calculating ballistics trajectories. Mauchly became involved with this research, and it proved to be the ideal stimulus for his
own interests in developing a high-speed calculating machine that could handle huge amounts of data quickly and accurately. He was joined by his lab assistant Presper Eckert, whose job it was to translate Mauchly’s ideas into implementable
form. It was Mauchly the physicist, Eckert the engineer. The road to ENIAC was in view.
The heart of the exhibit is the development of the ENIAC itself. The exhibit provides a clear and accessible description
of the device and its place in the history of computers. Although its unveiling came after the war had been concluded, its
purpose was still framed in terms of national defense. On Valentine’s Day, 1946, the ENIAC entered history by performing
a large, complicated calculation to determine the feasibility of a hydrogen bomb.
The story of the ENIAC, however, was only one chapter—though the major one to be sure—in the career of a creative
and dedicated scientist. Mauchly’s stay at Penn was brief. No sooner had the ENIAC been successfully tested than
Mauchly and Eckert became involved in a dispute with the University over patent rights to the ENIAC. The dispute led to
their departure from Penn and to their pioneering ventures in the commercial development and application of computing
systems. Although they worked for Remington Rand for a short time, during which the UNIVAC was developed, Mauchly
and Eckert preferred a risky independence to the more secure and financially remunerative environment of a corporation.
Moreover, many in government and industry saw the enormous research and business potential of the ENIAC and its
successors; Mauchly and Eckert quickly found themselves in an intensely competitive and crowded field. To the end, their
own research interests remained more important to them than the profits of the marketplace.
Unlike many such exhibits, John W. Mauchly and the Development of the ENIAC Computer (continued on next page)
The exhibit portrays Mauchly not as the isolated, romantic
genius, but in the context of wider developments in the
history of science that helped shape the career of this
protean individual.
march 1996
13
The exhibit encourages us to think less in terms of questions of priority and more about
complex paths of discovery, paths connecting multiple pasts to multiple presents.
is not simply a celebration of a man and an event. Akera and Goldschmidt conceive it more as a case study of the nature
of scientific research and invention in the 20th century. Time and again the exhibit poses fundamental questions in the
history of science: What is creativity? What does it mean to “discover,” “to invent,” in science? To what extent is
scientific achievement a social, collaborative, and cumulative process? The exhibit portrays Mauchly not as the isolated,
romantic genius, but in the context of wider developments in the history of science that helped shape the career of this
protean individual. The enormous importance of the ENIAC in the history of computing as well as for the marketplace
has made it a natural arena for priority disputes: Who really got there first? However, the exhibit takes a more balanced
and nuanced approach. It encourages us to think less in terms of questions of priority and more about complex paths of
discovery, paths connecting multiple pasts to multiple presents. The construction of the ENIAC triggered more than a
decade of claims, counter-claims, and law suits regarding invention and attendant proprietary rights. Akera and
Goldschmidt view these contests as characteristic of the ways in which the intrinsic complexity of scientific research can
frustrate, if not undermine, the apparent clarity of the law and the appeal of simple narrative answers to difficult questions.
On one issue, though, the exhibit is straightforward and insistent: It was the genius of Mauchly, his singularly unique
contribution, to have designed not only the first electronic digital computer, but to have grasped intuitively the many
related functions such a device could perform. If Mauchly had limited his vision to what the Army wanted, he might have
created a single-purpose machine with no wider applicability. It was because the ENIAC was so functionally rich that it
has come to occupy an important position in the history of science and technology. And who knows? Perhaps some
Valentine’s Day in the future will herald a solution to Valentine’s conundrum in Arcadia that recognizes the role played by
Mauchly in making it possible finally to predict the weather.
The exhibit formally opens on February 14 and runs through March in the Rosenwald Gallery. Gallery hours are
Mondays–Fridays, 9 AM–5 PM, and from 10 AM–2 PM on Saturdays. Those who cannot come to the Library to see the
actual show can see its virtual version on the Web at http://www.library.upenn.edu/special/events.html.
MICHAEL T. RYAN is Director of Special Collections for the University of Pennsylvania Library.
Photos: John W. Mauchly Papers, Department of Special Collections, University of Pennsylvania Library.
14
PENNPRINTOUT
events
ENIAC
golden
The detailed calendar of events planned for the 18-month
long celebration of the ENIAC and the birth of the
information age is available on the Penn Web (http://
www.seas.upenn.edu/~museum/calendar.shtml). Here is a
brief look at some of the events scheduled for February
and March.
Computer Technology in Art exhibition
February 2–25
A presentation of two- and three-dimensional works of art
that utilize computer technology. Nexus Foundation for
Today’s Art, 137 N. 2nd Street. Information: Dina Ward
(215/629-1103).
Institute of Contemporary Art exhibition
February 5–19
A celebration of the impact of computers and information
technology on art and culture by Gary Hill. Institute of
Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania, 36th and
Sansom Streets. Information: Patrick Murphy (215/898-7108).
ENIAC 50th anniversary exhibition
February 9–17
“From Vacuum Tubes to Microchips” at the Shops at
Liberty Place, 16th and Market Streets. Information:
Expert Events (215/724-6644).
IBM’s Deep Blue versus Garry Kasparov
February 10, 11, 13, 14, 16, and 17 at 3 PM
The chess tournament between World Chess Federation
Champion Garry Kasparov and IBM’s Deep Blue computer. Pennsylvania Convention Center. Information:
(800/342-6626).
ACM Computing Week ’96
February 14–20
ACM, the first society in computing, celebrates its 50th
anniversary. Information: http://www.acm.org/
conferences/computing_week/.
ENIAC 50th anniversary day events
February 14
10 AM–3PM: Educational Technology Showcase
featuring Penn faculty, students, and staff demonstrating
march 1996
1996
march
anniversary
locally developed, state-of-the-art projects. Houston
Hall, Bodek Lounge.
noon–1 PM: A press conference features the reactivation
of part of the original ENIAC, exactly 50 years after it
was first unveiled to the public.
1:30–3 PM: “ENIAC in Context,” the first session of the
ACM History Program, deals with the development of
the ENIAC within the social, cultural, and intellectual
environment of its time. Philadelphia Marriott, 12th and
Market Streets.
3–4:30 PM: Connaissance Presents: a major presentation by a nationally known technology leader. Irvine
Auditorium.
3:30–5 PM: “ENIAC’s Legacies,” the second session of
the ACM History Program, deals with the significant
hardware and software developments of the past 50
years, as well as the people involved. Philadelphia
Marriott, 12th and Market Streets.
6:30–9:30 PM: A “Celebration Honoring the Creation
of Modern Computing” features a speech by Vice
President Al Gore, the announcement of the 1996
Bower Award winners, and the announcement of the
1996 ACM Alan M. Turing Award winner during a
reception and dinner at the Philadelphia Marriott, 12th
and Market Streets. Information: Greater Philadelphia
First (215/575-2200).
International Literacy Conference
February 15–17
“New Technologies for Adult Learning,” sponsored by
the National Center on Adult Literacy, University of
Pennsylvania. Information: Dan Wagner (215/8982100).
American Music Theater Festival
March 20–24
“CrossWaves ’96” highlights the use of new technologies
in theater art. Annenberg Center, 36th and Walnut
Streets. Information: Marjory Samoff (215/893-1570).
15
felice macera
Happy Birthday ENIAC
thanks to robert smith, john derrickson, and paul shaffer
—Al Gore, Vice President, United States of America
—Judith Rodin, President, University of Pennsylvania
—Stanley Chodorow, Provost, University of Pennsylvania
—Edward G. Rendell, Mayor of Philadelphia
—Peter C. Patton, Vice Provost, Information Systems
& Computing
—John A. Fry, Executive Vice President, University
of Pennsylvania
16
PENNPRINTOUT
Futurists predicted computers might make us less human.
Instead, they have given birth to a new age of information
and freedom. Happy birthday to the 30 ton beginning of
it all!
—Gregory Farrington, Dean, School of Engineering
& Applied Science
Dear ENIAC
Although you’re turning 50
And your tubes are old and gray
Your I/O is outdated
And your memory’s just 2K
You’re still the inspiration
For the WWW and Cray
And for all the computations
That we carry out today
—Gershon Buchsbaum, Interim Chair, Bioengineering
—James A. Unruh, Chairman of Unisys
—Kay Mauchly Antonelli, widow of John Mauchly,
Consulting Engineer, ENIAC project
—Judith R. Eckert, widow of J. Presper Eckert, Chief
Engineer, ENIAC project
From vacuum tubes and vicious conflict, to global villages
and virtual toys dancing in the mind of a child. Your birth
is celebrated every time your progeny are used to unite
humankind in community and creativity.
—Herman H. Goldstine, Liasion Officer, ENIAC project
Born half a century ago and still an infant, you have had
a most profound effect on our generation. May we
have the wisdom to use you in the pursuit of the goals
that are the most noble in humankind.
—Patrick T. Harker, Chair, Systems Engineering
You were conceived for the purposes of war. How wonderful to see children learning to read from your progeny.
—Sohrab Rabii, Chair, Electrical Engineering
—Ira M. Cohen, Chair, Mechanical Engineering
& Applied Mechanics
Your descendants have carried us to the shores of
unexpected new worlds of connection and information.
Because of you, we have become pioneers, just beginning a vast transformation of how we work, create, learn,
and interact with one another.
Your progeny have changed research in chemical
engineering and the practice of chemical engineering.
May the next 50 years be as revolutionary and exciting.
—Mitch Marcus, Chair, Computer & Information Science
—Raymond Gorte, Chair, Chemical Engineering
march 1996
17
BY JILL MASER
cybersociety
2046
photo and graffiti: meak
Earth has only two classes of society: the techno-haves and the techno-have-nots. The techno-haves visit friends
across the globe, cavort on sun-drenched beaches, and enjoy the best of Broadway’s plays—all without leaving their
homes. The have-nots exist underground in crime-ridden decay. They have no access to the technology that makes
the good life possible, nor to education, the key to survival in the year 2046. Is this the stuff of science fiction?
18
PENNPRINTOUT
Not so, according to several groups of Penn students
assembled recently to discuss how the world will look in
the year 2046. Although each group articulated virtually
the same vision of a frightening underground uprising by
the have-nots, all the students remain optimistic that
technology will also bring forth changes for the good of
society and the planet.
Some of the students’ thoughts mirror those that
accompanied the advent of the VCR. It was thought then
that “nesting” would become prevalent, that people
would spend less time outside the home, opting instead
for the comfort of home theater. But while video stores
have proliferated, movie theaters continue to rake in our
entertainment dollars. We may prefer nesting at times,
but as one student said, “We are inherently social, we
need to socialize.” Indeed, many of the students see
technology opening new channels for us to meet people
we would not normally meet. While “a small percentage
of the population will remain Internet freaks,” technology
will allow efficiencies in everything we do, including
socializing.
In the 50 years since the birth of the ENIAC, the
world has already become a smaller place. Communication is easier and faster, and media coverage of world
events is instantaneous. The students see a continually
shrinking world, one where real-time capabilities, such as
coverage of news and financial markets, will infringe on
our “down-time.”
But technological advances will also allow us more
time to think and be creative, which will in turn lead to
Mechanical language translators will eliminate
embarrassing faux pas as we communicate with
colleagues around the world. We might see privatized
mining operations set up on nearby planets. And we
might elect our President and Congress by voting on
the Internet.
A more disturbing scenario is the social division and
turmoil that the students foresee. As technology invades
every aspect of our lives, those who have access to it and
to education will rise to the top of society, and those who
do not will become the “slave class of the technologically
literate elite.”
The situation will generate two responses. Some
techno-haves will break away and “get back to basics.”
One graduate student imagines that “people will opt out
of the techno race and create communes where they can
experience real human contact and diversity. Spiritual
communities will spring up on the coasts.”
Those less privileged, the techno-have-nots, will
become a rebel class. All the students envision some
kind of backlash against the “haves.” They believe that
as the gap widens, the have-nots will go to greater
lengths to commit crimes to get a share of money and
power. Instruments of crime will become more deadly.
Just as warfare has become less personal with the
introduction of computer-launched and tracked missiles,
instruments of personal and corporate crime will also
become remote. People will create viruses to disable
technology. People will kill for fun.
The students also see a parallel divergence between
All the students agree that regardless of the outcome of
technological innovations over the next 50 years, some level
of social responsibility needs to accompany the advances.
innovation and better technology. Economic growth will
occur, some world problems will be solved, and exciting
innovations in the arts, sciences, business, and government will take place.
We will, for example, enjoy viewing three-dimensional murals. We will be able to call up the name of a
playwright and view a production of the play we select.
The medical profession will change. Specialists will not
need to come to the hospital, and surgeons will perform
their miracles from remote locations. Virtual diagnoses
will be possible, and animated programs will show us our
ailments and how we might overcome them. We will be
able to make sophisticated decisions about our care.
march 1996
countries that have money and technology and those that
do not. While technology makes information readily
available and leads the way for movements such as
glasnost, some nations will remain outside the information age because free access to information makes it
harder to control their citizens. As one student noted,
technological advances are easy compared to the difficulty of changing people—especially people responsible
for governing a populace they fear.
The students picture a couple of large, technologically advanced countries dominating the world. Will
these countries help the rest of the world or exploit
others? Here the students
(continued on next page)
19
Exploitation will be the only way to survive a critical time when
there will not be enough food, space, or money to go around.
diverge. One group thinks that powerful countries will
simply invade “uncooperative” countries and take what
they need or want. “It all boils down to politics versus
resources,” said a student who believes that exploitation
will be the only way to survive a critical time when there
will not be enough food, space, or money to go around.
Other students see good relations among countries, fostered by the improved communication capabilities. Industries of the future may not have to be located in today’s
first-world countries. New technology will allow information—and perhaps even products—to be sent around
the world in new ways. Powerful hubs such as those in
the United States and Europe may become obsolete.
How will some of the horrific elements of this vision
come about? As one student noted, “People who develop
the technology aren’t necessarily concerned with its
20
photo: dan fishman
graffiti: slae
The graffiti pictured
in this article cover city
walls in Philadelphia.
They, along with other
examples of graffiti
around the world, can
be found at the Art
Crimes site on the World
Wide Web. URL:
http://www.graffiti.org/.
implications; people use technology to increase power
and wealth.” Another student, concerned that technology
provides the means for us to “abuse our anonymity,”
noted that “cruelty to others and taking no responsibility
for our actions are products of a dehumanized, desensitized society.” All the students agree that regardless of
the outcome of technological innovations over the next
50 years, some level of social responsibility needs to
accompany the advances. If society does not consider
the implications of the uses of technology, some of the
more frightening scenarios described by the students
could easily become reality. Let us hope that
CyberSociety 2046 is indeed the stuff of science fiction.
JILL MASER is Director of Operations Analysis in the
Office of the Executive Vice President.
PENNPRINTOUT
announce ments
ENIAC in the news
Penn wins supercomputing award
Recent research by Penn computer historians has
uncovered the fact that the ENIAC was one of the first
electronic devices to have a conditional branch. Modern
computer languages use IF...THEN...ELSE for branching.
The wires that ran around the ENIAC carried two
kinds of pulses: number-pulses and control-pulses. The
number-pulses represented numbers from zero (no pulses)
to nine (nine pulses). The control-pulse was used to
trigger the next step of the calculation.
The ENIAC operators found that if they connected a
number-pulse wire to the control-pulse input, it could be
used to control the execution of the program. Here is how
it worked: If the output on the number-pulse wire was a
non-zero number (one or more pulses), then it could be
used to start another step. But, if the output was zero (no
pulses), then the operation would halt.
Some scholars contend that it is the ability to branch
that separates a computer from a calculator. Here is
another way to say it:
The National Scalable Cluster Project (NSCP), a
collaboration of the Universities of Pennsylvania, Illinois,
and Maryland, won the award for “High Performance Data
Management and Mining” at the Supercomputing ’95
conference last December. Data mining, extracting useful
information from extremely large collections of data, is
becoming increasingly interesting as many scientific and
commercial groups struggle with the increasingly dataintensive needs of modern computing.
Researchers at the three universities linked computers
together using special high-speed communication techniques that form the basis of many plans for new national
communications infrastructures. These new techniques,
called asynchronous transfer mode or ATM, are the
specialty of several researchers at Penn, particularly
Jonathan Smith in the Department of Computer & Information Science. Professor Robert Hollebeek’s group in
Physics specializes in the configuration of large computers
or large numbers of computers to simultaneously “mine
data.” Examples of data mining at Penn include fast, realtime analysis of images (Professor Ruzena Bajcsy), very
large linguistics samples (Professor Mark Liberman), and
large databases from particle physics (Professor Hollebeek).
The award resulted from a competition called the
“High Performaance Computing Challenge,” which was
judged by a national panel of experts. The competition
featured groups seeking to outdo each other in commandeering the largest number of processors in a race toward
the first demonstration of “teraflop” computing.
IF a machine has the ability to branch,
THEN
it’s a computer,
ELSE
it’s just a calculator.
Penn wins Web awards
Three World Wide Web services at Penn, the Penn
Web itself, Oncolink, and the African Studies Web, have
all been rated among the top 5 percent of all sites on the
Internet by Point Survey, a free service that rates and
reviews only the best sites on the Web.
PennNet services and support
Data Communications and Computing Services
(DCCS) is developing a new set of “official” Web pages
that contain information about major PennNet services as
well as product information for network software. The
new pages are available from the DCCS home page
(http://www.upenn.edu/dccs/).
march 1996
Conference on “Networked Information”
Penn will again host a CAUSE-Coalition for Networked Information conference on “Networked Information” on May 30–31 at the Penn Tower Hotel. For more
information: http://www.upenn.edu/ccni96/.
New Vi-Spy release
To get the latest release of Vi-Spy, version 12.0 release
10.95, bring a blank, unformatted, high-density diskette to
the Computing Resource Center, 3732 Locust Walk.
21
ENIAC’s recessive
T
he ENIAC demonstrated to the world that largescale, high-speed, electronic computation was
possible, triggering a wave of new computer
designs and the birth of the computer industry. Despite the
ENIAC’s success, one fundamental aspect of its design is
only now becoming part of the design of everyday computers, after remaining dormant for nearly 50 years.
At the heart of the ENIAC was a set of 20 independent
accumulators, each an electronic adding machine that
could take in a number and add it to an existing total every
200 microseconds. In principle, a programmer could
arrange that all 20 of these adding machines do new
additions in parallel, allowing the ENIAC to perform not
5,000 but 100,000 additions a second. In this way, the
ENIAC was fundamentally a parallel machine.
Almost immediately the ENIAC’s programmers
decided, in the words of J. Presper Eckert [chief engineer
on the ENIAC project] that parallel programming introduced “a number of inconveniences and difficulties” so
that “in programming a machine, it is undesirable to try to
do several operations in parallel.” Eckert noted that
because there was no mechanism to allow a third operation
to continue only after two parallel sets of operations had
both completed, the two paths had to take exactly the same
length of time. Although SEAS researchers have recently
shown that there is a simple trick that would solve this
problem, it now appears that the ENIAC programmers
were actually uninterested in parallel programming. Why?
Betty Hoberton, one of the two programmers of the
demonstration program executed on February 14, 1946,
recently noted that setting up a complex parallel algorithm
was simply too time consuming, given that it took nearly a
day to move heavy digit trays and connect cables to set up
even a simple problem on the ENIAC. Also, since the
machine’s operation was unaffected by tube failures in
accumulators that weren’t being used, the smaller the
program, the longer it would run until a tube failed.
Parallel computing disappeared for 25 years.
In the late 1960s parallel computing burst forth once
more, now called supercomputing, driven by the very high
computational needs of a range of important engineering,
scientific, and military problems. To simplify both
gene
BY MITCH MARCUS AND ATSUSHI AKERA
hardware and software, many supercomputers use a very
limited kind of parallel processing, where the same
operations are performed in parallel on many different
data points.
Most surprisingly, the inside of the Intel Pentium
has a close resemblance to the ENIAC’s accumulators.
Internally the Pentium converts machine instructions into
operations that are given to any free arithmetic unit, each
of which operates in parallel; some of these units are
interconnected so that results from one can go directly
into others.
A closer successor to the ENIAC can be found inside
every CD player. Converting the stream of numbers stored
on a CD back into music involves many different steps.
Each step is actually a computer program executed on
special-purpose computer chips in the CD player called
digital signal processors (DSP). The key operation in
many of these programs, performed again and again,
involves multiplying together the results of two additions.
To speed up the conversion of numbers into music, each
DSP contains two accumulators whose outputs are fed into
a single multiplier unit so that two adds and a multiply are
all performed in parallel. Programming these algorithms
on the ENIAC would have been very natural.
Finally, although not usually recognized as such,
research in what are now called data flow machines is
attempting to recreate in modern, general form the original
flexibility of the ENIAC. A data flow machine has many
different processing units connected together exactly as the
programmer wishes, but now reconfigurable under highspeed computer control. The ENIAC was exactly such a
data flow machine, only externally programmed.
Developing an effective data flow architecture will require
the development of new methods to provide high-speed
switching at very low cost, but the payoff will be latterday ENIACs that run many times faster than current
computers.
MITCH MARCUS is Chair of the Computer and Information Science Department of the School of Engineering and
Applied Science; ATSUSHI AKERA is a graduate student
in the Department of History and Sociology of Science.
Background: The circuit design for the
ENIAC II chip follows the original’s
architecture of independent accumulators.
Opposite, inset: Programmer Betty
Hoberton was one of many women who
contributed to the original ENIAC
project. Here, four programmers set up
a calculation. Photo: John Mauchly
Papers, Department of Special Collections, University of Pennsylvania Library.
jack
BY NORMAN I. BADLER
M
ost virtual worlds have been populated by fairly
simple objects with simple appearance or motion. With the
increase in rendering and computational power of modern
workstations, more interesting inhabitants can now be
added to our virtual worlds: simulated humans. Creating
simulated human agents that behave realistically is one of
the research goals of Penn’s Center for Human Modeling
and Simulation. The Center’s Jack™ visualization software
contains a powerful and extraordinarily interactive 3D
human model that is used to analyze how people will
interact with a wide variety of systems or environments.
One application for real-time human models is human
factors analysis, which involves visualizing the appearance,
capabilities, and performance of humans as they execute
tasks in a simulated environment. Human factors applications serve a broad population that knows how to design
things but does not usually have prior skill in computer
animation of people. Human models can also be applied to
training situations. For example, in medical training Jack
can be both patient and medic in an emergency care
simulation.
The Jack model contains almost all the essential human
skeletal joints and it can be scaled to different body sizes
based on population data. The figure can be manipulated so
that it moves in several directions simultaneously: For
example, it can grip a moving steering wheel with both
hands while sitting in a car, looking out the rear-view
window and pressing the floor pedals with its feet. Jack can
walk and turn naturally, grasp objects, and follow objects
with his eyes. He can even tell you if the load he is
carrying exceeds NIOSH guidelines or his strength limits.
For a virtual reality experience, a Jack system can be
configured with immersive VR glasses, digitizing glove,
24
and 3D magnetic body tracking, permitting the user to
visualize and move his or her entire body (not just a
“disembodied” hand) in the virtual environment.
The Jack software runs on Silicon Graphics workstations, which have 3D graphics features that aid interaction
with highly articulated figures. The environment provides
state-of-the-art 3D rendering through hardware, ray-trace, or
Renderman interfaces. There is also an API (Application
Programmer Interface) through which Jack acts like a server
for human motion for other software or CAD systems.
Jack is presently the virtual employee of choice at
institutions as varied as heavy equipment manufacturers,
vehicle designers, and the military, making him clearly a
“Jack-of-all-trades.” And along with his physical development, Jack’s cognitive capabilities are expanding. He can
play “hide and seek” and engage copies of himself in limited
conversation. Among the next steps in Jack’s evolution are
speech synthesis and understanding, nonverbal communication, and personality development.
Jack has enjoyed funding from numerous sources,
including ARPA, NSF, Army, Air Force, ONR, NLM, and
several industrial sponsors. The software is licensed
commercially by the HMS Center and is available to the
Penn community at no charge except for manuals and
training costs. For more information, contact Karen Carter,
Associate Director HMS, Computer and Information
Science, Moore Building, Philadelphia, PA 19103-6389
(215/898-1488) or visit Jack’s home page on the Penn Web
(http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~hms/jack.html).
NORMAN I. BADLER is Director of the Center for Human
Modeling and Simulation in the School of Engineering and
Applied Science.
PENNPRINTOUT
Graphics available from Jack’s Web site. Above: Simulated driving tasks such as gripping a
moving steering wheel and braking. Inset: Modeling an emergency care situation on a
battlefield. Opposite left: Automatic reaching for and grasping an object using a variety of
grip styles.
march 1996
25
media power
BY JOHN MACDERMOTT
a
cer
a
em
ic
fel
Polyhedral explorations
“You start with a cube, you cut the corner off ... and
you stick it back in the hole, and then ... you cut the
opposite corner off and turn that piece around ... and
shove it back in the opening, that intersects with the first
piece that you shoved in the other corner, so that you cut
the opposite corners off, you’re going along the diagonal
of the cube, and you end up with a little cube inside.”
—Robinson Fredenthal
Most sculpture lasts a long time. Figures in bronze
or stone endure and no one needs to rely on verbal
descriptions to share an artist’s experiment in geometry.
But what if sculpture is perishable? Must the experiment
disappear with the physical medium?
Sculptor and Penn alumnus Robinson Fredenthal has
explored three-dimensional geometry not only in large,
durable works but also in hundreds of fragile paper
models. In 1995 he approached Penn’s Architectural
Archives to see how his large body of perishable work
might be preserved. Director Julia Moore Converse,
along with Jeff Cohen and Mark Aseltine of the Graduate
School of Fine Arts and GSFA student Brian Phillips,
decided to try using new media technologies to document
and analyze Fredenthal’s work.
Cohen and Phillips cataloged over 1,000 works,
26
One of the most exciting aspects of new
media technologies is the creative
power they have put in the hands of
scholars. The two Penn projects
discussed below illustrate how academic inquiry and disciplined research
methods are driving these technologies
into the mainstream of education. For
more information about interactive
media initiatives developed at Penn see
http://www.upenn.edu/newmedia/
projects/academic_projects.html.
identified several “families” of shapes, and photographed
arrangements in Fredenthal’s studio. They recorded
interviews with Fredenthal, discussing the specific pieces
and how they related to each other. Using 3D graphics
software, they reconstructed some of the shapes
Fredenthal had described and developed step-by-step
illustrations of how they were derived. They also used
Apple’s QuickTime Virtual Reality (QTVR) software to
simulate the experience of handling a sculpture. QTVR
“object movies” allow users to interactively rotate an
object on screen and view it from all sides. Cohen and
Philips have generated QTVR movies both from photographs of sculptures and from their 3D graphics.
Phillips’ work on this project has become an
independent study course, and Aseltine is now his faculty
advisor. Phillips has created a Web site devoted to
Fredenthal that includes a photographic catalog of his
works, videos, QTVR movies, text transcribed from
interviews, biographical material, and critical commentary (http://dolphin.upenn.edu/~gsfa/rf/). The site is
organized around families of shapes and offers detailed
analysis of key works.
This semester Phillips is photographing QTVR
scenes of some of Fredenthal’s large outdoor pieces,
including the “Black Forest” sculpture on Penn’s campus
PENNPRINTOUT
at 34th and Walnut Streets. These QTVR scenes are
interactive, 360-degree photographic panoramas that
allow viewers to simulate the experience of viewing the
sculpture in its surroundings. Phillips also continues to
create QTVR object movies of the paper models and new
3D graphics to illustrate selected geometric principles.
assistant, Ralph Ranjit Bhatnava, available to develop
HyperCard scripts.
The exercise begins with pre-reading activities that
help students supplement their background knowledge
about Mexico and develop awareness of issues in the
story. Students enter words they associate with Mexico:
Calor, playa, sombrero, cerveza, mar, tacos, and pobre
are commonly mentioned by students, who admit their
“Es que somos muy pobres”
responses are stereotypical.
Spanish Language Coordinator Julia Aguilar thinks
Students then view pictures showing the realities of
there’s something missing in the traditional reading
rural Mexico. Students also record their associations
experience for intermediate Spanish students. For those
with the word campesino. They scan the story text,
lacking a cultural context to draw upon, reading assignidentify the characters, view video clips, and answer
ments can become rote
questions about them.
translation exercises
The clips include the
and literary appreciamaterial shot in
tion is diminished.
Mexico plus interAguilar’s doctoral
views with critics
research has indicated
and the author Juan
that the reading process
Rulfo. Students can
involves more than dehear the first paracoding words to recongraph read aloud in
struct a message. Bethe voice of the story’s
cause a reader’s backnarrator, a young
ground knowledge also
Mexican boy.
contributes to underWhile reading the
standing, reading in a
text, students use an
second language can be
online glossary. They
click on an unfamiliar
constrained not only by
word to obtain a
unfamiliar vocabulary
definition that may be
and linguistic structures
either written or
but by the reader’s limpresented visually
ited cultural knowledge.
with photos and video
As part of her dissertaclips. To complete the
tion work, she has creexercise, they answer
ated a multimedia-ennot only questions
riched reading exercise
about events in the
to help her study how
story but also about
cultural empathy affects
the Mexican worldreading comprehension.
Multimedia provides students a window on rural
view in general.
She began by travMexico in Julia Aguilar’s new CD-ROM for Spanish
Finally, students take
eling to Mexico to vid140. The CD-ROM enriches students’ understanding
away a printout of
eotape footage to
of the short story by Juan Rulfo, “Es que somos muy
their word associasupplement “Es que
pobres” (It’s because we’re poor).
tions, answers to
somos muy pobres”
questions, and
(It’s because we’re poor),
vocabulary inquiries.
a story from Spanish 140
Preliminary results have indicated positive effects on
about a farmer’s efforts to provide his daughter a dowry
comprehension compared to a control group, and
and keep her from a life of prostitution. Aguilar taped
superior vocabulary recall. Testing in full begins this
interviews with a campesino (farmer), a young girl, and
semester as students in several sections of Spanish 140
with prostitutes. Other footage showed the environment
use the program and provide the data on which Aguilar
of rural Mexico. Back at Penn, she worked with her
will base her formal analysis.
dissertation committee to develop an instructional design
and with Jay Treat at the SAS Prep Center to prepare the
JOHN MACDERMOTT is New Media Specialist for
media elements. Professor Ralph Ginsberg, one of
Information Systems and Computing.
Aguilar’s dissertation advisors, made his research
march 1996
27
Electronic Calendar
ISC hands-on courses
Special Courses
These courses meet at the Computing Resource Center
(CRC), 3732 Locust Walk. Call 573-3102 to register.
Registration begins February 26. If you cannot attend
a course, you must cancel 48 hours in advance.
Introduction to HTML—Penn faculty & staff only
March 5, 9:30 AM–12:30 PM; March 21, 1–4 PM
Covers basic HTML formatting, creating hot links,
and moving files to and from a World Wide Web
server. Prerequisites: Familiarity with Web browsers
and an understanding of URL syntax.
Courses for DOS and Windows users
Introduction to WordPerfect for Windows
March 7, 9:30 AM–12:30 PM
Includes creating, saving, retrieving, editing, and
printing files. Prerequisite: Windows course or
tutorial.
Intermediate Word for Windows
March 14, 1–4 PM
Covers features used in complex documents, such as
merging, using templates, creating macros, and
customizing toolbars. Prerequisite: Introduction to
Word for Windows or equivalent.
Intermediate WordPerfect for Windows
March 19, 9:30 AM–12:30 PM
Covers features used in complex documents, such as
customizing the button bar, merging documents,
creating macros, using templates, and creating
tables. Prerequisite: Introduction to WordPerfect
for Windows or equivalent.
Courses for Macintosh users
Introduction to Microsoft Word
March 12, 9:30 AM–12:30 PM
Includes creating, saving, retrieving, editing, and
printing files.
Intermediate Microsoft Word
March 25, 1–4 PM
Covers features and functions needed to produce
complex documents, such as creating style sheets,
merging documents, setting up tables, customizing
toolbars, and creating glossaries. Prerequisite:
Introduction to Word or equivalent.
Introduction to Excel Spreadsheets
March 27, 1–4 PM
Covers the basic functions of an electronic spreadsheet. Includes entering, editing, and formatting
data; using functions; writing formulas; printing.
28
ISC B&P seminars
Bits & Pieces seminars meet at the CRC, 3732 Locust Walk,
unless otherwise noted. Registration is not required.
Introduction to Netscape
March 4, noon–1 PM; March 20, noon–1 PM;
March 25, 1–2 PM
Covers configuring Netscape to launch the Penn
Home Page, setting preferences, creating hotlists,
and navigating to popular Internet sites.
Introduction to WS_FTP (Windows)
March 13, noon–1 PM
Introduction to file transfers over the Internet using
WS_FTP. Covers starting a connection to a host,
short cuts, and viewing and downloading files.
Introduction to Fetch (Mac)
March 28, 1–2 PM
Introduction to file transfers over the Internet using
Fetch. Covers starting a connection to a host, short
cuts, and viewing and downloading files.
Human Resources
Registration is required. Call 898-6176.
Overview of the Personnel/Payroll System
March 11, 3–5 PM
5th Floor Conference Room, 3401 Walnut St.
Covers personnel/payroll terminology, processes,
time frames, and contact offices. For new employees.
Online Personnel Processing
March 12, 9 AM–noon, Suite 265C, 3401 Walnut St.
Hands-on workshop covers how to use the UMIS
computer to maintain employee records. Prerequisite:
Basic understanding of employee types, job class codes,
accounts, and subcodes.
PENNPRINTOUT
Van Pelt Library
Biomedical Library
All sessions except individualized training and “Surf the
Electronic Library” meet in Room 502, Van PeltDietrich Library Center. Registration required. Sign up
at Van Pelt Reference, call 898-8118, send e-mail to
librefer@pobox, or use an electronic form (http://www.
library.upenn.edu/vanpelt/forms/workshop.html).
All courses meet in the Biomedical Library Lab.
Call 898-5817 or register online via http://
www.library.upenn.edu/biomed/.
LEXIS/NEXIS Noontime Training—Penn students &
faculty only
March 4, noon–1 PM; March 11, noon–1 PM; March 18,
noon–1 PM; March 25, noon–1 PM
Internet Resources Noontime Training
Elections: March 5, noon–1 PM
Women’s Studies: March 19, noon–1 PM
Gay & Lesbian Studies: March 27, noon–1 PM
DIALOG Energy, Environmental & Geology Databases
March 6, noon–1 PM
Britannica Online
March 7, noon–1 PM
Surf the Electronic Library (hands-on course)
March 19, 7–8 PM; March 28, 7–8 PM
How to connect to Franklin, Penn’s online catalog,
and databases like WLS and LEXIS/NEXIS; how to
locate online help for electronic resources; and how
to surf the “net” through the Library Web page.
RLIN/Eureka Noontime Training
March 20, noon–1 PM
Electronic Library Demonstration
March 21, 3–4:30 PM
An overview of the Library’s electronic resources,
including the Franklin online catalog, WILS, RLIN/
Eureka, and LEXIS/NEXIS, and Internet Resources
available through the Library Web page.
Individualized Training on Electronic Resources
Monday to Friday, 9:30–10 AM, Moelis Online Search
Room. Advance registration is required.
For Penn students, faculty, or staff who want individualized training on a specific electronic resource
such as Franklin (Penn’s online catalog), a CD-ROM
database, a commercial online system such as
DIALOG, or a networked resource such as RLIN/
Eureka or LEXIS/NEXIS. (Note: LEXIS/NEXIS
training is for faculty and students only.)
march 1996
Biomedical Information on the Internet
March 6, 4–6 PM; March 28, 11 AM–1 PM
An overview of basic Internet activities and applications. Network ID and password required.
Biomedical Database Searching Using OVID Software
March 5, 4–6 PM; March 22, 2–4 PM;
March 27, 10 AM–noon
Advanced OVID Subject Searching
March 20, 2–4 PM
Searching the World Wide Web
March 8, 10 AM–noon; March 25, 2–4 PM
Finding biomedical information using Lynx and
Netscape Web browsers.
Reference Manager/EndNote Plus
By appointment. Call 898-9905
End-user Searching using Grateful Med
By appointment. Call 898-9905
Lippincott Library
Lippincott Online Training
For information, call Lippincott Reference, 898-5924; send
e-mail to lippinco@wharton; or check Lippincott Library’s Web
page (http://www.library.upenn.edu/lippincott/).
Interest Groups
Digital Media and Publishing Group meeting
March 5, noon–1:30 PM. Place to be announced.
This new group encompasses the old Desktop
Publishing and Interactive Technologies Interest
Groups. Info: http://www.upenn.edu/newmedia/ or
John MacDermott, 898-3046 or macderm@isc, or
Randall Couch, 898-6243 or couch@isc.
Super User Group meeting
March 11, noon–1:30 PM. 285-6 McNeil Building.
Info: Donna Milici, 898-0426 or donna@isc.
29
Ra nD om bit s
Modems with similar specifications don’t work equally
well on PennNet. To eliminate a frequent source of
difficulty in establishing a network connection, use a US
Robotics 14.4. or 28.8 Sportster modem. These models,
available at the Computer Connection, have been tested
thoroughly and shown to work with PennNet.
Wharton students: If you’re having trouble with
SPIKE, try to use the copy of Netscape installed with
your Internet applications (look in the “PennNet PPP”
Program Manager group in Windows or in the folder you
selected during installation on the Macintosh). If
Netscape doesn’t work, contact First Call, 57-FIRST. If
Netscape works but SPIKE doesn’t, contact
Wharton’s computer consultants, 898-8600.
Is Netscape freezing your Macintosh? The
Defrost system extension “defrosts” all versions of Netscape and works on Macs and
Power Macs running System 7 or later. Download it from http://cygnus.rsabbs.com/
~ssykes/nsdefrost.html.
New Internet search engines offer much
more functionality than their predecessors.
Check Internet Search Tools on the Library’s
Internet Resources page (http://
w w w. l i b r a r y. u p e n n . e d u / r e s o u r c e s /
resources.html) for examples. Alta Vista, for
example, searches Web pages and Usenet
messages using Boolean operators, proximity (phrase searches), and relevancy ranking.
This full functionality increases your chances
of finding exactly what you want.
The DOS/Windows FTP site at Oakland
University now has a Web page front-end to
its software archive, including subject categorizations, a
search engine, and file listings that include dates, byte
sizes, and brief descriptions (http://www.acs.oakland.edu/
oak.html).
It’s 1996—have you changed your password? To
change your Dolphin or Pobox password, log in to your
account, then at the [MAIN MENU]% prompt, type
passwd. You will be prompted to type your current
(old) password, then your new password twice.
30
PPP for Windows users: Make sure you have only one
WINSOCK.DLL file and that it’s in the C:\NET\BIN subdirectory. Having more than one WINSOCK.DLL causes
problems with Internet applications, e.g., Netscape.
Penn’s Computer Connection has sold approximately
51,500 computers and printers since 1984.
If you are having startup problems in Windows 3.1 or
Windows for Workgroups, try starting Windows by typing
win /b. This creates a file in the Windows directory
called BOOTLOG.TXT, which records the Windows
startup procedure and any files or devices that fail to load.
Each week the Library selects and annotates sites considered especially useful to
Penn faculty and students for its “Cool
New Sites” list. The sites are also included in the Library’s Internet Resources
listing under the appropriate category.
Need the zip code for Crumpled Springs, ND? Search
the Postal Service’s address and zip code site (http://
www.usps.gov/ncsc/aq-zip.html).
Longing for WordPerfect’s blue screen? In Word 6 for
Macintosh, select Options from the Tools menu, and in
the General section, check Blue Background, White Text.
In Word 6 for Windows, select Options from the Tools
menu, select the General tab, and check Blue Background, White Text.
PENNPRINTOUT
Q&A
Somebody created aliases on my Mac. How can I
locate the original files?
Macintosh alias files are small files that point to
complete, original files that can be located on your hard
drive, on diskettes, or on file servers. To locate an
original file, single-click on its alias and then select Get
Info from the File menu. From there you can click on the
Find Original button to locate the original and pull it up
in an active window on your screen. The path to the
original file also appears in the Original: field in the Get
Info window. For example, Original: Macintosh
HD:Documents:Test tells you that the original file named
Test is on the volume (hard drive) called Macintosh HD,
in the Documents folder. —Kristin Nelson, CRC
I’ve heard about new memory chips called DIMMs.
What are they and will I be able to use them?
Currently, SIMMs (Single Inline Memory Modules)
are the de facto standard for memory for most computers.
However, some newer computers (most new Mac models
and some high-end workstations) use DIMMs (Dual
Inline Memory Modules), which can handle larger
amounts of data at one time. Data handling is measured
by the number of bits in the data path, and the path used
by DIMMS is twice as wide as the path used by SIMMs.
Because DIMMs are physically larger than SIMMs, they
do not fit into computers designed for SIMMs and vice
versa. Because memory design changes periodically, it’s
always advisable to check with the vendor from whom
you purchased your system before you add memory.
—Tom Gudmundsen, CRC
What are the files with the .grp file extension in my
Windows directory?
These files are the program group files displayed in
Windows Program Manager. They contain the icons for
each of your groups. For example, the file main.grp
contains all of the icons for the Main group. You may
want to make copies of the .grp files so you will not have
to recreate them if they are deleted accidentally or
damaged. —Caroline Ferguson, CRC
march 1996
I had a problem running a program in Windows 3.1.
A friend who had the same problem attributes it to
low System Resources in Windows. How can I check
to see what the available System Resources are?
System Resources is the area of memory that Windows sets aside to keep track of windows, icons, and other
features. Each program you run, including Windows,
takes up some System Resources. To check for available
System Resources select About Program Manager from
the Help menu in the Program Manager window.
When System Resources get low, you will generally
have problems with screen display and disappearing icons.
Ultimately your computer may lock up. There isn’t a hard
and fast rule for the amount of System Resources you
should have free, but you should be concerned if the
amount drops below 50 percent. To free up System
Resources quit some open applications and close any
unnecessary windows. —Caroline Ferguson, CRC
When I try to sign on to PennLIN databases like WILS
and OED, I get messages like “No patron exists for
this ID” and “Not a valid ID, try again.” What’s
wrong? I’m a Penn faculty member.
To use the PennLIN databases you must have a
current patron record with the Library. You can register
immediately by bringing your PennCard to one of the
Library’s Circulation Desks, but there will be a 24-hour
delay before your ID will be recognised for access to the
PennLIN databases. Once you’re registered, you’ll also
be able to borrow books and take advantage of other
library services. —Patricia Renfro, University Libraries
I upgraded to the more secure version of Netscape but
how can I tell if the sites I’m accessing are secure?
An unbroken key icon at the lower left corner of the
Netscape window indicates a secure site; a broken key indicates an unsecured site. Even when you access a secure
site, be careful of the kind of information you submit.
Exercise the same care you would when using your credit
card over the phone. —Caroline Ferguson, CRC
31
felice macera