J. Presper Eckert - Later Career

Later Career

Eckert remained with Remington Rand and became an executive within the company. He continued with Remington Rand as it merged with the Burroughs Corporation to become Unisys in 1986. In 1989, Eckert retired from Unisys but continued to act as a consultant for the company. He died of leukemia in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania.

In 2002 he was inducted, posthumously, into the National Inventors Hall of Fame.

Some computer historians—and Eckert himself—believed that the widely-adopted term "von Neumann architecture" should properly be known as the "Eckert Architecture," since the stored-program concept central to the von Neumann architecture had already been developed at the Moore School by the time von Neumann arrived on the scene in 1944-1945. Eckert's contention that von Neumann improperly took credit for devising the stored program computer architecture was supported by Jean Bartik, one of the original ENIAC programmers.

UNIVAC was not 'finished' in December, 1950. I joined Eckert-Mauchly in the Spring of 1951 as a junior engineer. I had a very minor role in the design of UNIVAC I. It was made available to the Bureau of the Census at our facility in Philadelphia in the Summer of 1951. The Bureau did not want the delay necessary to move the prototype to Washington, DC. Later that year the prototype also had a role in forecasting the results of the presidential election.