This post originally appeared on Motherboard, Nov. 5, 2010.Contrary to what you probably believe, the first computer wasn’t Philadelphia’s 1946 ENIAC. It was the desk-size machine built by John Vincent Atanasoff and Clifford Berry in the basement of the physics building at Iowa State University in the late 1930s.Using vacuum tubes to perform its logical operations, the ABC (for Atanasoff-Berry computer), which was completed in 1942, could do laborious mathematical calculations electronically. And because it wisely used a binary number system, it was more efficient than ENIAC, which depended upon decimals. But the machine was little known at the time, and remains all but lost to popular computer history. That’s partly what prompted novelist Jane Smiley, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, to tackle the story in her newest book, The Man Who Invented the Computer.She was also drawn to the story by the pathos and drama of the inventor. The prickly professor built the computer while working on his dissertation in quantum mechanics, and later tackled other challenges, including measuring the effects of nuclear test explosions. While Atanasoff died wealthy and respected, his pioneering digital computer was forgotten until the late 1960s, when a legal battle broke out over patents that the project leaders of ENIAC had filed regarding basic computing concepts. The decision of a 1973 patent suit named him the inventor of the first automatic electronic digital computer.By then, Atanasoff had destroyed his machine.In a Wired interview about the story, Smiley explains how Atanasoff’s machine got lost:Wired: One of the reasons the ENIAC was so large is that it was a decimal machine. Atanasoff's computer was binary, which is much more efficient. But if Mauchly knew all about Atanasoff's computer, why didn't he use his best idea?
Smiley: Atanasoff understood binary enumeration, and this was not typical. His mother, who was trained as a mathematician, taught him different number systems when he was a boy. So it was only a fluke that Atanasoff was totally comfortable with binary systems.
Wired: What a strange story. You're telling me now that Mauchly, despite trying to steal Atanasoff's ideas, actually wasn't able to steal the best of them, because he didn't understand them.
Smiley: Keep in mind that they wanted to get the ENIAC going as fast as they could because of the war. The ENIAC was a kind of mishmash of all the things that they could put together as fast as possible. It didn't include binary enumeration, but it did use vacuum tubes and counting rather than measuring for calculation. Atanasoff's ideas were at the core of what Mauchly wanted to do, and his next successful computer, the Univac, was binary.
Wired: Why didn't Atanasoff patent his computer?
Smiley: He thought Iowa State was busily patenting it. They weren't.
Wired: Why not?
Smiley: Atanasoff was an irritable, frank guy who was a little hard to get along with. Also, the outside people they brought in were all involved in analog computing. They didn't think that the future was in electronic computing.Read the rest of the interview at Wired, and see Iowa State’s collection of historical materials. And check out this 16mm film about Atanasoff.
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