Moore School Lectures - Background

Background

In 1946 the Moore School in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania was at the center of developments in high-speed electronic computing. On February 14 of that year it had publicly unveiled the ENIAC, the first general-purpose electronic digital computer, developed in secret beginning in 1943 for the Army's Ballistics Research Laboratory. Prior even to the ENIAC's completion, work had begun on a second-generation electronic digital computer, the EDVAC, which incorporated the stored program model. Work at the Moore School attracted such luminaries as John von Neumann, who served as a consultant to the EDVAC project, and Stan Frankel and Nicholas Metropolis of the Manhattan Project, who arrived to run one of the first major programs written for the ENIAC, a mathematical simulation for the hydrogen bomb project.

World War II had spawned major national efforts in many forms of scientific research—continued in peacetime—that required computationally intensive analysis; the thirst for information about the new Moore School computing machines had not been slaked, but instead intensified, by the distribution of von Neumann's notes on the EDVAC's logical design. Rather than allow themselves to be inundated with requests for demonstrations or slow progress in computer research by withholding the benefits of the Moore School's expertise until papers could be published formally, the administration, including Dean Harold Pender, Prof. Carl Chambers, and Director of Research Irven Travis, respectively proposed, organized, and secured funding for what they envisioned as a lecture series for between 30 to 40 participants enrolled by select invitation.

The 8-week course was conducted under the auspices of the U.S. Army's Ordnance Department and the U.S. Navy's Office of Naval Research, who promised (by verbal authorizations) the $3,000 requested to cover lecturer salaries and fees and $4,000 for travel, printing, and overhead. ($1,569 over this figure was ultimately claimed.)

Even as the Moore School found itself in the computing spotlight, its computer design team was disintegrating into splinter groups who hoped to advance computing research commercially, or academically at more prestigious institutions. In the former group were ENIAC co-inventors J. Presper Eckert and John Mauchly, who the previous March had departed the Moore School amidst a patent rights dispute to found the first computer company, the Electronic Control Company (later renamed to Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation), and took many on the Moore School staff with them; in the latter group were Herman Goldstine (the Army's liaison to the Moore School who served as administrative overseer of the ENIAC's construction) and Arthur Burks (a Moore School professor on the ENIAC design team), lured to the Institute for Advanced Study by von Neumann. Despite the somewhat acrimonious fracturing of the ENIAC/EDVAC group, these figures gave the majority of the Moore School Lectures, with Eckert and Mauchly receiving the highest salaries ($1,200 each), while Goldstine and the others received only travel expenses and an honorarium ($50 per lecture).