Editing ENIAC (section)

===Role in the development of the EDVAC===
A few months after ENIAC's unveiling in the summer of 1946, as part of "an extraordinary effort to jump-start research in the field",<ref name="Mac">{{harvnb|McCartney|1999|p=140}}</ref> [[the Pentagon]] invited "the top people in electronics and mathematics from the United States and Great Britain"<ref name="Mac"/> to a series of forty-eight lectures given in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; all together called ''The Theory and Techniques for Design of Digital Computers''—more often named the [[Moore School Lectures]].<ref name="Mac"/> Half of these lectures were given by the inventors of ENIAC.<ref>{{harvnb|McCartney|1999|p=140}}: "Eckert gave eleven lectures, Mauchly gave six, Goldstine gave six. von Neumann, who was to give one lecture, didn't show up; the other 24 were spread among various invited academics and military officials."</ref>

ENIAC was a one-of-a-kind design and was never repeated. The freeze on design in 1943 meant that it lacked some innovations that soon became well-developed, notably the ability to store a program. Eckert and Mauchly started work on a new design, to be later called the [[EDVAC]], which would be both simpler and more powerful. In particular, in 1944 Eckert wrote his description of a memory unit (the mercury [[delay-line memory|delay line]]) which would hold both the data and the program. John von Neumann, who was consulting for the Moore School on the EDVAC, sat in on the Moore School meetings at which the stored program concept was elaborated. Von Neumann wrote up an incomplete set of notes (''[[First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC]]'') which were intended to be used as an internal memorandum—describing, elaborating, and couching in formal logical language the ideas developed in the meetings. ENIAC administrator and security officer [[Herman Goldstine]] distributed copies of this ''First Draft'' to a number of government and educational institutions, spurring widespread interest in the construction of a new generation of electronic computing machines, including [[Electronic Delay Storage Automatic Calculator]] (EDSAC) at Cambridge University, England and [[SEAC (computer)|SEAC]] at the U.S. Bureau of Standards.<ref name=":2" />