Mauchly, John W

Mauchly, John W(illiam)

(born Aug. 30, 1907, Cincinnati, Ohio, U.S.—died Jan. 8, 1980, Ambler, Pa.) U.S. physicist and engineer. He joined the faculty at the University of Pennsylvania after completing his graduate studies. During World War II he and J. Presper Eckert were asked by the U.S. Army to devise ways to accelerate the recomputation of artillery firing tables, for which they eventually developed the electronic computer ENIAC. The two men formed a computer-manufacturing firm in 1948, and in 1949 they produced the Binary Automatic Computer (BINAC), which used magnetic tape instead of punched cards for data storage. Their third computer, the UNIVAC I, was designed to handle business data.