Word: atanasoff
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Your story on the 40th birthday party for the ENIAC reminds me of the phenomenal strides made in computer technology in a relatively short period of time [COMPUTERS, Feb. 24]. But unfortunately, in retelling the controversy over the patent, you made John Atanasoff appear as the villain of the piece. The Honeywell-Sperry Rand trial was a lengthy and thorough process, and after reviewing the trial transcript of 20,667 pages, the judge took seven months before handing down a statement that included this sentence: "Eckert and Mauchly did not themselves first invent the automatic electronic digital computer, but instead...
...Turing first described the computer--a machine that could perform logical functions based on whatever instructions were fed to it--and then proceeded to help build one in the early 1940s that cracked the German wartime codes. His concepts were refined by other computer pioneers: John von Neumann, John Atanasoff, J. Presper Eckert and John Mauchly...
...First computer that uses vacuum tubes built by John Atanasoff...
...years, ENIAC's principal creators, the late John Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert, held the unchallenged title of inventors of the modern computer--until an obscure physicist named John Atanasoff came forth to dispute their claims. In the late 1930s, while teaching at Iowa State College, he and a graduate student named Clifford Bell began building a device that would allow them to solve large linear algebraic equations. Their machine, later called ABC (for Atanasoff Berry Computer), incorporated a number of novel features, including the separation of data processing from memory, and relied on binary numbers instead of ENIAC...
...entirely forgotten. In the late 1960s, Sperry Rand, which held the rights to Eckert and Mauchly's original UNIVAC patents, sued Honeywell (which, like IBM, had got into the computer business) for royalty payments. At one point in the six-year litigation, Atanasoff testified that Mauchly cribbed ABC's key features during a five-day visit in 1941. Mauchly indignantly denied the accusation. But the judge took a different view. In a 1973 decision that was never appealed, he invalidated Eckert and Mauchly's patents and in effect declared Atanasoff the winner. Historians, however, interpret the ruling more broadly, viewing...