Retrospective: Mauchly on the trials of building ENIAC: People could not see how something with 18 000 tubes and costing $500 000 could ever become practical!

Today the digital computer is as accepted a part of the business and industrial environment as fluorescent lights, copying machines, and all the other paraphernalia of the modern business world. Which is why when I remember back thirty-four years to the time J. Presper Eckert and I were discussing how to build the world's first completely electronic computer, I am struck by how terribly difficult it was to sell the idea.