Abstract
February 1946 saw the public unveiling of the ENIAC, an electronic computing system that had been in development at the University of Pennsylvania since 1943 under the leadership of J. Presper Eckert and John Mauchly. As with many R&D projects, what motivated the designers and what justified the funding were not exactly the same thing. The U.S. Army funded the project primarily because the teams at UPenn and at Aberdeen, MD, USA were not able to keep up with the need for computing artillery firing tables for the war effort. However, everyone involved knew that the real intent was to build a general purpose machine that could solve a wide variety of problems, not just artillery calculations [1] , [2] . In fact, the first major application of the machine in late 1945 was related to bomb development at Los Alamos [3] , [4] . Later in summer 1946, D. H. Lehmer used the ENIAC to carry out some number theoretic research related to prime numbers [5] – [9] .
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