During World War II, a group of scientists led by Max Newman, a mathematician from Cambridge University, and including Alan Turing and several thousand others, attacked the German high command's coded messages to decrypt their contents and produce intelligence that became known as "Ultra." Working at Bletchley Park, England, these scientists achieved their goal, despite ever more complex encryption devices, by developing a series of computer-like machines culminating in an electronic marvel known as Colossus.

The first prototype began operating in February 1944, and several additional machines were prepared in time for D-day in June 1944--two years prior to the unveiling of ENIAC. Though their accomplishments were not revealed to the world until 1970, the scientists at Bletchley Park were able to use their knowledge in developing portions of the British computer industry. Today, a museum at Bletchley Park is reconstructing a Colossus.

On February 14, 1946, the University of Pennsylvania unveiled the ENIAC, designed by J. Presper Eckert and John Mauchly to compute firing tables for the Aberdeen Proving Ground. Though arguably not the first "computer," having been preceded by Konrad Zuse's Z-1 and Z-2 machines in Germany (1935-38), John Vincent Atanasoff and Clifford Berry's regenerative memory machine (1939), Howard Aiken's Harvard Mark I (a.k.a. ASCC, 1944), and Colossus in Great Britain, ENIAC was the first fully operational electronic, general-purpose machine. Though programming was essentially completed by rewiring, and the stored memory was not yet implemented, ENIAC was a parallel processor well ahead of its time.

John Mauchly, J. Presper Eckert, and Herman Goldstine were charter recipients in 1980 of the IEEE Computer Society Pioneer Award. Goldstine had been an Army lieutenant at Aberdeen during the war, serving as the liaison between the Army and the University of Pennsylvania, where a band of female "computers" were hand-calculating firing tables. It was Goldstine who negotiated a contract between the proving ground and the university to build ENIAC. Later, Goldstine teamed with John von Neumann to construct the IAS machine, which led to a series of derivatives including the Illiac, Johnniac, Maniac, and Silliac.

In 1982 and 1984, respectively, Pioneer Awards were presented to Arthur Burks for his early work on electronic computer logic design related to the ENIAC, and to Nicholas C. Metropolis of the Los Alamos National Laboratory, who used the ENIAC, with what may have been its first program, to solve atomic energy problems. In 1945 Eckert and Mauchly applied for a patent for ENIAC, a move that created a rift between them and the university. From the ENIAC concept, Eckert and Mauchly established the world's first computer company, which Remington Rand eventually bought in February 1950. After several other transformations, it became part of Unisys Corp. The ENIAC patent was eventually issued on February 4, 1964, almost 20 years later, only to be overturned in the Honeywell v. Sperry suit in which Judge Earl Larson, Minneapolis US District Court, specified that "Eckert and Mauchly did not themselves first invent the automatic electronic computer, but instead derived that subject matter from one Dr. John Vincent Atanasoff." John Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert disputed this finding throughout their lives.

Computing pioneers born in February

Thomas J. Watson Sr. was born February 17, 1874. Though the statement "The world only needs three computers" is often attributed to him, his foresight in involving the company in the construction of Howard Aiken's Mark I calculator and the development of the Selective Sequence Electronic Calculator, together with his support of early research on electronic digital devices, laid the foundation on which his son would build a giant computer company.

Computer Society Pioneer Awards have been presented to several whose birthdays occur in February:

• David Wheeler received his award for his early work on assembly language programming, and especially for his development of the "Wheeler jump," the means of implementing a subroutine call.
• Richard Hamming, a charter recipient of the Pioneer Award, is known not just for his development of the error-correcting codes that bear his name, but also for his widely quoted aphorisms: For example, "The purpose of computing is insight, not numbers." "Anything a faculty member can learn, a student can easily."
• Niklaus Wirth, developer of the programming language Pascal (and subsequently Modula and Oberon) received his award in 1987, shortly after he said, "I do not know what the [programming] language of the year 2000 will look like, but I am sure it will be called Fortran."
• Thomas Kurtz, another programming language developer, received his award in 1991. With John Kemeny, also a Pioneer Award recipient, Kurtz developed the programming language Basic and the Dartmouth Time Sharing System, both of which led the way to student-friendly systems.

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