John Adam Presper Eckert was an American electrical engineer and computer pioneer. He was born on Born on April 9, 1919, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Eckert was educated at the Moore School of Electrical Engineering at the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, where he and his professor, John W. Mauchly, made several valuable improvements in computing equipment. In 1946 the pair fulfilled a government contract to build a digital computer, which they called ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer). In primitive form, ENIAC contained virtually all the circuitry used in present-day high-speed digital computers. It was used by the U.S. Army for military calculations. Eckert was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 1967. In 1968 he was awarded the National Medal of Science “for pioneering and continuing contributions in creating, developing, and improving the high speed electronic digital computer”. He died on June 3, 1995 in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania, United States.