ENIAC, at Penn, in Philadelphia, right? No, well, maybe. It depends. The plaque at the ENIAC dispaly there is pretty cagily worded: “the first large-scale general purpose computer”. So, was there a smaller predecessor of some kind? Can’t be. We surely would know about by this time. A milestone like that couldn’t just be forgotten, could it? Yes. We have come to think too well of ourselves especially in scientific and technical matters. It’s all progress; no digressions or dead ends, and above all no going backwards. But things get overlooked and then forgotten all the time. And it’s starting to look as though the same thing happened in the history of the computer. It took a novelist, that is, a spinner of fictions, to set the story straight. Jane Smiley is the lady in queston. She’s a professor at the University of Iowa and a writer of considerable reputation. It all goes like this. In the 1930s, physics and engineering and chemistry were confronting the fact that problems were getting harder to solve because they involved so much brute calculation. Consequently, there was a lot of interest in the possiblity of mechanizing some of this routine computation. Two guys at Iowa, John Atanasoff and Clifford Berry started work on the task in the late 1930s and finished it in 1942. It was called the ABC, for Atanasoff Berry Computer. It was desk-sized, and used vacuum tubes for the logic gates (transistors were years in the future) and it worked just fine. Some heavy hitters, such as Von Neumann, knew about it and were impressed. So was the design team from the ENIAC project at Penn. It fact, they liked it so much that they borrowed some of the methods and features. This fact would come out later in the patent trial between Sperry-Rand(ENIAC) and Honeywell which wanted to break the Sperry patents. The borrowings were enough for the judge to toss out the Sperrypatents. But poor little ABC stat in its chilly Iowa basement forgotten. Finally, it was just disassembled and thrown away. Jane Smiley’s book The Man Who Invented The Computer Doubleday 256 pages, is a biography of Atanasoff, and it was released in October. I guess Berry figures in the story somewhere, but he sort of drops out of the picture it seems. Atanasoff went out to do other interesting stuff with computation, founded a company, got rich and enjoyed a good reputation. ABC got junked.
There is still some dispute about this “first computer” business. Several partisans support the claim of COLOSSUS, the top, top secret British computer devised in WWII to help the Bletchley Park group decrypt German radio traffic coded with the ENIGMA machine. It wasn’t a “general purpose” machine, but it was pretty powerful. The secrecy surrounding it never let its claims at “firstdom” get a vetting. The whole Bletchley Park operation was only revealed in the 1970s. Although some historians had smelled a Rodent, they couldn’t prove anything because there were no documents and nobody was talking. BP was a large operation, employing thousands. Most of the people working there had no idea about what was going on, but still.
ABC
