In early 1943, with the Allies fighting Japan and Germany in Europe, Africa and the Pacific, and the U.S. military looking for any advantage over the Axis powers, two men had an idea: Why not calculate each munition's ballistic artillery tables using a programmable, digital, electronic calculator?

Those men were physicist John Mauchly and engineer Presper Eckert Jr. and their idea for a machine would result in the first recognizable "computer" called ENIAC, short for Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer.

In his book, "ENIAC: The Triumphs and Tragedies of the World's First Computer," Wall Street Journal reporter Scott McCartney brings us a well-paced, if not riveting, account of how a gadget-loving physicist and his driven engineer cohort teamed up to build the first computer.

The book follows the two after their fated meeting at the University of Pennsylvania's Moore School of Electrical Engineering in the summer of 1941. It focuses on their battle to sell an all-analog academic establishment on the idea of a digital computer.

After having more success in 1943 with the Army, Mauchly and Eckert began to build ENIAC. Fraught with politics and setbacks, the 30-ton monstrosity was completed too late to aid the war effort. When finished in the fall of 1945 at a cost of about US$487,000, the computer was made up of 17,458 vacuum tubes and could calculate an artillery shell's trajectory in 30 seconds -- far faster than the 20 hours required by the women, the original "computers," who had performed the task during the war. (See The secret mission of the first computer programmers.)

Today, a supercomputer could perform the same function in 3 microseconds.

Who invented the modern computer?
While the history is engaging, the book truly revolves around a single question: Who invented the modern-day computer?

As ENIAC neared completion, John von Neumann, a flamboyant scientist, became involved with the team at the Moore School. While much of modern day computer theory is based on von Neumann's theories, McCartney argues that he is not the father of the modern computer.

Instead, the author points to Mauchly and Eckert.

The largest flaw with the book's narrative is that McCartney's argument for Mauchly and Eckert frequently leans towards apology.

An example: While the author elevates Mauchly and Eckert from the roles of tinkerers and condemns their treatment at the hands of John von Neumann, in the same breath McCartney dismisses another inventor who also holds claim to the title "Father of the Computer" -- John V. Atanasoff.

Atanasoff has been frequently called the lost father of the computer. After hearing Mauchly give a lecture about the use of an analog computing device for weather prediction, the Iowa State University professor invited the physicist-cum-inventor down to look at an all digital computing device upon which he was working.

Mauchly went down to Iowa in June 1941 to look at the device -- later known as the Atanasoff-Berry Computer -- for a weekend. Afterwards he entered the Moore School where he went onto develop his ideas about the computing into the ENIAC.

The degree to which that view of an all-digital technology helped the creators of ENIAC is unknown. Yet, in the 1970s, a patent dispute resulted in a ruling that stated unequivocally that the ENIAC included much of Atanasoff's technology.

However, McCartney does not raise the issue during the narrative until very late in the book, and picks apart the criticism leveled against Mauchly, despite having leveled similar criticism against von Neumann a few chapters before.

Still, it's just this sort of debate that seems to be inextricably woven into the fabric of the history of the first working computer. With so many engineers and scientists working on basic calculating machines -- from Howard Aiken's Mark I to Atanasoff's ABC -- the mantle of the Father of the Computer may forever be one worn by many.

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