Wes Phillips

Computerworld posts a fascinating interview with J. Presper Eckert, who co-invented the first practical all-electronic computer—a tube computer.

Some things never change. "ENIAC had 18,000 vacuum tubes. The tubes were off the shelf; we got whatever the distributor could supply in lots of a thousand. We used 10 tube types, but could have done it with four tube types; we just couldn't get enough of them."