- Who
- Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation
- What
- first first
- Where
- United States (Philadelphia)
- When
The first computing start-up was the Eckert–Mauchly Computer Corporation, founded by American researchers J Presper Eckert and John Mauchly (both USA) on 8 December 1947. The company was created to build and sell computers, supported by the portfolio of patents filed by its two founders during their work on ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer) at the University of Pennsylvania's Moore School of Electrical Engineering.
Eckert and Mauchly had begun thinking about how their inventions might be commercialized as early as 1944. Interviews with officials from the US Census Bureau and the Army Signal Corps persuaded them that there would be a market for electronic computers in the post-war era. In March 1946, shortly after ENIAC was unveiled to the public, the two left the University of Pennsylvania to avoid having to sign over their patents to the university, and began looking for investors.
The young company was staffed in large part by Eckert and Mauchly's former students from the Moore School of Electric Engineering. Initially all the company’s efforts were focused on a contract to build a computer for the US Census Bureau (a design that would come to be known as UNIVAC).
Over the next two years, however, the company ran into difficulties. This was the height of the McCarthy era of anti-communist sentiment in the United States, and the Eckert–Mauchly Computer Corporation was accused of having hired engineers with "communistic sympathies". As a result they lost contracts to build UNIVAC models for the US Army, Navy and Air Force.
The loss of these contracts, combined with development delays on the UNIVAC, made the company increasingly financially unstable. A few simpler projects were undertaken in an attempt to balance the books, but these id not bring the revenue Eckert and Mauchly had hoped for. On 15 February 1950, the world's first computer start-up was bought by typewriter and office-equipment firm Remington-Rand, becoming the older company's computing division (which made UNIVAC-branded computers until the 1970s).
