So, I take a Computer History class online and we have been reading about, you guess it, Computer History. In the beginning the text starts by introducing the readers to Eckert and Mauchly, the creators of the ENIAC also known as the UNIVAC. They used these computers to aid the military with their calculations for their firing tables because doing them by hand was time consuming and took up to 76 hours for each new weapon..and that's about it. Their original machine the ENIAC was lacking in speed and had to be basically rebuilt every time they used it. A man named John von Nuemann, who at the time was an international mathematician, joined their team and introduced them to the stored-program principle. That is what made the evolution of the ENIAC to the UNIVAC. The UNIVAC's speed was 10x greater than the ENIAC. They sold 6 of these large computers to military departments but they weren't able to come up with any other tech and eventually went bankrupt and their company was sold to Remmington-Rand. Here's my issue, does Eckert and Mauchly really have any significance in computer history? If anything, they influenced other companies but impact wise on computer history they really don't have one. On this site it states that "Some might attempt to credit J Presper Eckert and John William Mauchly as the fathers of the first electronic digital computer but for all the reasons give above I would prefer to give them the credit for setting up the first computer company -". This makes me feel some sort of validation of my thinking but we also have other sources that say that they do have a sort of impact on computer history. Eckert and Mauchly received "numerous honors and awards for their work, having both received the U.S. National Medal of Science in 1969 and the IEEE Computer Society Pioneer Award in 1980."(Massachusetts Institute of Technology) The fact they received an computer society pioneer award for their "achievements" would mean that they had a significance, right?
Are these myths bias or are they true? In Irvin's essay, "What Is “Academic” Writing?" he outlined and debunked 7 myths that most high school and college students were made to believe as they evolved as writers. The Myths Are: Myth #1: The “Paint by Numbers” myth Myth #2: Writers only start writing when they have everything figured out Myth #3: Perfect first drafts Myth #4: Some got it; I don’t—the genius fallacy Myth #5: Good grammar is good writing Myth #6: The Five Paragraph Essay Myth #7: Never use “I” Most of these myth's I have personally never heard of but I just can't agree with myth #1. The myth is described as "writers believe they must perform certain steps in a particular order to write “correctly.” Rather than being a lock-step linear process,-". Maybe it's just me being stubborn but I've always been taught to follow an evidence triangle or some type of layout when I wrote essays and it made it a little more easier an...
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