Word: computerize
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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If you look at most history books, they'll tell you ENIAC (for Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer) was the first true all-purpose electronic computer. Unveiled in 1946 in a blaze of publicity, it was a monstrous 30-ton machine, as big as two semis and filled with enough...
But while this electronic brain, as headline writers called it, took the spotlight, ENIAC had a lot of unsung rivals, many of them shrouded in wartime secrecy. At Bletchley Park, Alan Turing built a succession of vacuum-tube machines called Colossus that made mincemeat of Hitler's Enigma codes. At...
For 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...
But not 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...
So who did invent the computer? Novel as it may have been, ABC could not be reprogrammed, did not handle large numbers well and never became fully operational. By contrast, the reprogrammable ENIAC did initial calculations for the H-bomb, kept flashing away for nearly a decade and led to...