J. Presper Eckert

We knew we had something important, but we had no idea it would become the foundation of a new industry.

Reliability was our god. We had to worship at that altar every single day.

The idea of a stored program wasn't a sudden flash of genius; it was an obvious next step once you had the hardware.

I never thought of myself as a visionary. I was just solving a very practical problem for the Army.

The mercury delay line memory was like trying to store your thoughts in a running river.

You don't get to be first by waiting for someone else to do it.

Our biggest competitor was not another company, but skepticism.

Every tube that failed was a lesson in what not to do next time.

The computer is essentially a giant timing device. Everything must happen at the exact right microsecond.

I was more interested in making it work than in who got the credit.

The UNIVAC wasn't a computer; it was a data processing system. That was the key to its commercial success.

We built the BINAC to prove we could make a computer that worked on an airplane. It had to be small and reliable—two words not often associated with computers then.

Software? We called it 'programming.' It was part of the machine's design.

The future of computing lies in making it accessible, not just to scientists, but to businesses.

An engineer sees a theory and asks: 'How can I build it?' That was our approach.

Failure is just a data point. You learn from it and move on.

The press called ENIAC a 'giant brain.' We called it a high-speed calculator. They were both right, in a way.

Precision in engineering is not a luxury; it is the entire foundation.

We weren't philosophers. We were craftsmen building a new kind of tool.

The transition from vacuum tubes to transistors was inevitable. The physics demanded it.