The Moore School of Electrical Engineering at the

University of Pennsylvania The University of Pennsylvania (also known as Penn or UPenn) is a private research university in Philadelphia. It is the fourth-oldest institution of higher education in the United States and is ranked among the highest-regarded universitie ...

came into existence as a result of an endowment from Alfred Fitler Moore on June 4, 1923. It was granted to Penn's School of Electrical Engineering, located in the Towne Building. The first dean of the Moore School was

Harold Pender Harold Pender (1879–1959) was an American academic, author, and inventor. He was the first Dean of the University of Pennsylvania's Moore School of Electrical Engineering, a position he held from the founding of the School in 1923 until his ...

. The Moore School is particularly famed as the birthplace of the computer industry: * It was here that the first general-purpose Turing complete digital electronic computer, the

ENIAC ENIAC (; Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer) was the first programmable, electronic, general-purpose digital computer, completed in 1945. There were other computers that had these features, but the ENIAC had all of them in one pac ...

, was built between 1943 and 1946. * Preliminary design work on the

's successor machine the EDVAC resulted in the

stored program A stored-program computer is a computer that stores program instructions in electronically or optically accessible memory. This contrasts with systems that stored the program instructions with plugboards or similar mechanisms. The definition ...

concept used in all computers today, the logical design having been promulgated in

John von Neumann John von Neumann (; hu, Neumann János Lajos, ; December 28, 1903 – February 8, 1957) was a Hungarian-American mathematician, physicist, computer scientist, engineer and polymath. He was regarded as having perhaps the widest cove ...

's ''

First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC The ''First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC'' (commonly shortened to ''First Draft'') is an incomplete 101-page document written by John von Neumann and distributed on June 30, 1945 by Herman Goldstine, security officer on the classified ENIAC pro ...

'', a set of notes synthesized from meetings he attended at the Moore School. * The first computer course was given at the Moore School in Summer 1946, leading to an explosion in computer development all over the world. * Moore School faculty

John Mauchly John William Mauchly (August 30, 1907 – January 8, 1980) was an American physicist who, along with J. Presper Eckert, designed ENIAC, the first general-purpose electronic digital computer, as well as EDVAC, BINAC and UNIVAC I, the first ...

and

J. Presper Eckert John Adam Presper Eckert Jr. (April 9, 1919 – June 3, 1995) was an American electrical engineer and computer pioneer. With John Mauchly, he designed the first general-purpose electronic digital computer (ENIAC), presented the first course in c ...

founded the first computer company, which produced the

UNIVAC UNIVAC (Universal Automatic Computer) was a line of electronic digital stored-program computers starting with the products of the Eckert–Mauchly Computer Corporation. Later the name was applied to a division of the Remington Rand company an ...

computer. The Moore School has been integrated into Penn's School of Engineering and Applied Science. It no longer exists as a separate entity; however, the three-story structure itself still stands and is known on campus as the Moore School Building. Originally constructed in 1921 as a two-story building by Erskin & Morris, it was renovated in 1926 by

Paul Philippe Cret Paul Philippe Cret (October 23, 1876 – September 8, 1945) was a French-born Philadelphia architect and industrial designer. For more than thirty years, he taught at a design studio in the Department of Architecture at the University of Pennsylv ...

and a third story was added in 1940 by

Alfred Bendiner Alfred Bendiner (23 July 1899 - 19 March 1964) was an American architect and artist, perhaps best known for his caricatures and cartoons. Biography He was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, the son of Hungarian immigrants Armin and Rachel Hartmann ...

Notes

External links

* A complet
history for all of Penn Engineering
including the Moore School. {{Authority control University of Pennsylvania campus Educational institutions established in 1923 Electrical engineering departments 1923 establishments in Pennsylvania