John Mauchly in the context of Kathleen Antonelli

ENIAC (/ˈɛniæk/; Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer) was the first programmable, electronic, general-purpose digital computer, completed in 1945. Other computers had some of these features, but ENIAC was the first to have them all. It was Turing-complete and able to solve "a large class of numerical problems" through reprogramming.

ENIAC was designed by John Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert to calculate artillery firing tables for the United States Army's Ballistic Research Laboratory (which later became a part of the Army Research Laboratory). However, its first program was a study of the feasibility of the thermonuclear weapon.

The von Neumann architecture—also known as the von Neumann model or Princeton architecture—is a computer architecture based on the First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC, written by John von Neumann in 1945, describing designs discussed with John Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert at the University of Pennsylvania's Moore School of Electrical Engineering. The document describes a design architecture for an electronic digital computer made of "organs" that were later understood to have these components:

• A central arithmetic unit to perform arithmetic operations;
• A central control unit to sequence operations performed by the machine;
• Memory that stores data and instructions;
• An "outside recording medium" to store input to and output from the machine;
• Input and output mechanisms to transfer data between the memory and the outside recording medium.

The attribution of the invention of the architecture to von Neumann is controversial, not least because Eckert and Mauchly had done a lot of the required design work and claim to have had the idea for stored programs long before discussing the ideas with von Neumann and Herman Goldstine.

John Adam Presper "Pres" Eckert Jr. (April 9, 1919 – June 3, 1995) was an American electrical engineer and computer pioneer. With John Mauchly, he designed the first general-purpose electronic digital computer (ENIAC), presented the first course in computing topics (the Moore School Lectures), founded the Eckert–Mauchly Computer Corporation, and designed the first commercial computer in the U.S., the UNIVAC, which incorporated Eckert's invention of the mercury delay-line memory.