by Kevin Maney
USA Today
September 1997
The lid is about to come off one of history's technology feuds.
The battle is over who invented the computer: J. Presper Eckert and John Mauchly of ENIAC fame or less-famous University Professor John Atanasoff. It's bitter, it's dramatic and it's about hanging the course of history. It makes grudge boys Bill Gates and Scott McNealy look like two kids fighting over a Microsoft Barney doll.
Of course, the first computer was invented a long time ago and the principal players are all dead. But Iowa State has just spent three years and $300,000 constructing an exact duplicate of Atanasoff's machine--in part to disprove claims that it never actually worked. The Iowa State folks will turn it on for the first time in public October 8. If it doesn't electrocute somebody--apparently a real concern with this contraption--it might just solve a couple of equations and once again rile all the interested parties.
The story starts in the mid 1930s with Atanasoff driving 100 mph down a yardstick-straight Iowa road. "He would drive at high speeds on idle roads to clear his mind when he was working on physics problems," says John Gustafson, a professor at Iowa State and the leader of the project to reconstruct Atanasoff's computer. "It was, I'm told, a terrifying experience to get in the car with Atanasoff at the wheel."
Atanasoff was thinking about computers. There were already mechanical and analog computers. But Atanasoff thought there might be better methods of computing. He drove from dry Iowa to a bar over the Illinois line, drank three Scotch and waters, and had a Eureka! moment.
"That's when he figured out he could do everything in base 2," Gustafson says. Base 2 is digital. It's 1s and 0s. Previous computers worked in base 10. "He jotted on a cocktail napkin all the basic principles of modern computing."
Back at Iowa State, Atanasoff worked out a design for an electronic digital computer and, in 1939, got a grant of $650 to build it. He and graduate student Clifford Berry put it together in the unfinished basement of the physics building. A lot of parts were from telephone switchboards. When it was done, it was about the size of a desk, weighed 700 pounds and was packed with 300 vacuum tubes and a mile of wire. It could do about one operation every 15 seconds. (An equivalent computer today can do 150 billion operations in 15 seconds.) They called it the Atanasoff-Berry Computer, or the ABC.
It couldn't fit through the basement door. So there it stayed, pretty much in obscurity. And then came a twist.
In December 1940, Atanasoff attended a lecture about an analog computing machine devised for weather prediction, according to the book Computer by Martin Campbell-Kelly and William Aspray. The lecturer was Mauchly. Excited about finding a like-minded scientist, Atanasoff introduced himself and invited Mauchly to Iowa to see the ABC.
In June 1941, Mauchly stayed for five days in Atanasoff's home and apparently swiped all Atanasoff's ideas.
Mauchly took a job as a researcher at the University of Pennsylvania, World War II was on. He teamed with Eckert, got massive government funding and built ENIAC as part of the war effort. ENIAC became famous while the ABC was dismantled when somebody needed the space in the physics building.
Mauchly and Eckert filed for and got a patent for the electronic digital computer. After the war, Mauchly and Eckert started a company called UNIVAC, which was later bought by Sperry. In 1967, computer company Honeywell sued Sperry to try to invalidate the patent and end the licensing fees. The grounds? That Atanasoff was the true inventor.
In a nasty court battle, Mauchly said he took "no ideas whatsoever" from Atanasoff's work. The judge found differently, ruling that ENIAC was derived from the ABC. The patent was invalidated. Both sides in the lawsuit were left steaming mad.
No patent was awarded to Atanasoff. It had been too long since he'd done his work. Imagine if someone held the patent on the computer. Every computer company today would be paying billions of dollars in licensing fees. "Maybe it's better this way," Gustafson says. "The computer belongs to everybody."
Iowa State, though, would like more credit as the birthplace of the computer, especially since it essentially gets no such credit now. Building the ABC replica could help. One of the raps against Atanasoff was that no one knew whether the ABC actually worked. Gustafson says the replica, built to be exactly like the original, proves it could have worked and probably solved an equation or two.
ENIAC, though, was certainly the first truly functional, useful computer. It could do 5,000 operations per second and got massive media attention when it was first shown to the public in 1946.
All of which makes Gustafson sigh. If only Iowa State had realized the value of Atanasoff's work, history might have been different. For one thing, he says, "Silicon Valley would be a distant second to the Midwest."