If you ask a random person who [John Mauchly] or [J. Presper Eckert] were, you’d probably get a blank stare. Ask a Hackaday reader, and you have a better shot. People who know will tell you that the two were behind the famous ENIAC, which may or may not have been the first computer, but was certainly influential in kicking off the modern computer era. They worked at Penn, and now [Holly Mengel] of Penn’s Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books, and Manuscripts wants to introduce us to the other computers they worked on after ENIAC.

We will admit that we knew about EDVAC and UNIVAC. But we’ll also confess we didn’t know about BINAC or Skeduflo, a computer in a rather large suitcase. BINAC can claim to be the first digital computer that was commercialized, although you could argue that since it was fairly limited and, reportedly, never worked after it was delivered. Supposedly, the customer disassembled it, shipped it to a secure facility, and hired a freshly graduated engineer to rebuild it, which didn’t go very well.

We couldn’t find much about Skeduflo, other than that it was a 75-pound analog computer made for critical path method (CPM) analysis. You set up the problem with a patchboard and potentiometers, and the result came out on an analog plotter. Those details are from a PMI interview with [Morgan Walker] and [Jim Kelley].

It makes sense that these inventors didn’t just finish off ENIAC and retire to a tropical island. While UNIVAC had a good bit of success and EDVAC was very influential, the others are arguably fairly obscure. UNIVAC even has a Disney connection.