The Moore School Lectures Inspire the Construction of Early Stored-Program Computers

From July 8 to August 30, 1946 the Moore School lectures on “The theory and techniques for design of electronic digital computers” occurred at the University of Pennsylvania. The lectures began almost exactly one year after the ENIAC became operational. This series of lectures, attended by twenty-eight highly qualified experts, led to widespread adoption of the EDVAC-type design—including stored programs—for nearly all subsequent computer development. 

Lecturers included Howard Aiken of Harvard, Arthur Burks of the Moore School, Douglas Hartree of Cambridge, George Stibitz of Bell Labs and John von Neumann. However, the majority of the lectures were given by J. Presper Eckert, John Mauchly and Herman Goldstine, the principal developers of the ENIAC. The hand-picked "students" included Jay Forrester of MIT, Cuthbert Hurd of IBM, Claude Shannon of Bell Labs and Maurice Wilkes of Cambridge University.