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John Vincent Atanasoff: Forgotten Father of the Computer
| Article
# : |
17918 |
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Section : |
NATURAL SCIENCE
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| Issue
Date : |
3 / 1990 |
2,911 Words |
| Author
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Clark R. Mollenhoff
Clark R. Mollenhoff is professor of journalism at Washington
and Lee University in Lexington, Virginia. He is a Pulitzer
Prize winner and author of Atanasoff: Forgotten Father of the
Computer. |
For more than 30 years, John Vincent Atanasoff was the forgotten father of the electronic digital computer. Although Atanasoff and Clifford E. Berry, his graduate assistant, had constructed and electronic digital computer machine at Iowa State College between 1939 and 1941, all the computer textbooks, encyclopedias, and other literature identified ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer) as "the first electronic digital computer." That belief, though erroneous, was commonly held until October 1973, when an unchallenged federal court decision invalidated the ENIAC patents.
For more than 30 years, John Mauchly and Presper Eckert took bows and accepted awards from the scientific, academic, and corporate communities as the originators of the basic concepts present in all modern computers. In 1946, Mauchly, a physics professor, and Eckert, an electronics expert, filed applications for patenting the electronic digital concepts in ENIAC. They had jointly designed ENIAC in 1943, based on ideas that Mauchly had claimed to be his own original electronic digital computer concepts. Mauchly did not reveal, even to Eckert, that he had made a secret visit to Iowa State College in June 1941.
Mauchly Had the Handbook
He did not reveal to Eckert, or to anyone else at the Moore School of Electrical Engineering at the University of Pennsylvania, that he had been Atanasoff's houseguest for five days nor that during that period he had viewed the Atanasoff-Berry Computer (ABC), seen it operate, and had its functions explained by both Atanasoff and Berry. Nor did he acknowledge to Eckert or anyone else that during that visit to Ames, Iowa, he had been given access to the 35-page handbook that explained the electronic theories and construction plans of the ABC. His host had even permitted him to take the handbook to his room at night.
Mauchly knew at that time in 1941 that the ABC would solve simultaneous algebraic equations of up to 29 unknowns - the job it was designed to do. Atanasoff and Berry were highly enthusiastic about the great breakthrough they had achieved.
One is led to marvel that the invention of Atanasoff and Berry went unheralded and for all practical purpose unnoticed from 1941 until October 1973, the month when U.S. District Judge Earl R. Larson invalidated the ENIAC patents in an unchallenged ruling that stated: "Eckert and Mauchly did not themselves first invent the automatic electronic digital computer, but instead derived
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