The Moore School of Electrical Engineering at the

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

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. 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 c ...

's '' First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC'', 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 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 and a third story was added in 1940 by Alfred Bendiner.

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* 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