John Mauchly and John Eckert created the first electronic U. S. built, programmable computer, Eniac 1, which is now in the Smithsonian Museum at Washington, D.C. The year was 1946. They had been working on it for several years as part of the war encryption effort, while they worked as graduates at the University of Pennsylvania. It used 20,000 vaccuum tubes. The inside of the computer took up a whole room at the time, as shown above. There were other similar mechanical devices at the time, but this one was fully electronic and programmable. Most notably, IBM had the market for mechanical business machines. The government needed a computer to automate the 1950 Census, so Mauchley and Eckert created the first commercial computer, formed a company named Engineering Research Associates (ERA), won the contract, and went public in 1951. They named the computer Univac, which later became the name of the company. Employees from that company spun off several other companies, such as: Data 100, Cray Research, and Control Data. I joined Univac in 1967.

This poem is a Super Sonnet
A Super Sonnet is composed of several Quatrains closed by a rhyming Couplet. It generally utilizes all four of the primary rhyme schemes:

Alternate Rhyming - abab
Coupled Rhyming - aabb
Enveloping Rhyme - abba
Skipping Rhyme - abcb

So, the poem writes a set of the four types, and then repeats them as many times as the author wishes. The four sets are neccessary in every four stanza series, but not neccessarily in the same sequence. One required feature though, relates to the very last stanza, which is always the abcb rhyme type. The unrhymed third line of that stanza sets the rhyme for the final rhyming Couplet, thereby linking the last Quatrain to the Couplet. The creator of this format in unknown, but there are many examples of this form around.

For this poem I used only two sets of the four types. In the first four, I used - alternating, coupled, skipping, then enveloping. For the second set, I went - alternating, enveloping, coupled, and then skipping.

I kept the meter as iambic tetrameter.

This picture is from Yahoo Images. It is the inside of the Eniac1 computer.

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