ENIAC PATENT CONFISCATED

On this day in 1946, the Moore School at the University of Pennsylvania said engineers must relinquish their patents for equipment developed on school premises. The creators of ENIAC, J. Presper Eckert and John Mauchly, refused to sign the agreement. The researchers resigned from Moore shortly thereafter and filed an imdependant patent application later that year. In 1973, a district court judge voided the patent and made the controversial ruling that John Atanasoff - not Eckert and Mauchly - developed the first electronic computer.