Leaving Penn actually had been on Mauchly and Eckert's minds for some time. Both saw the computer for what it was: a tool to do other things, not an end unto itself. Neither had the drive to make the computer a scholarly pursuit. From the start, both Eckert and Mauchly intuitively recognized that the computer had enormous commercial application, and they both thought its development would be far faster in the business world than in academe. Remarkably, they understood even in 1945 that the computer's true strength lay in what it could do for others in business as well as in government. After all, Mauchly's own interest had arisen from the need for a computer to help forecast the weather. It could do much more. That was one reason they were driven to build a general-purpose machine, which could handle accounting problems just as easily as differential equations.