Atanasoff: Inventor, Problem-Solver, And Inventor of the Real Computer

A practical man, the late John Vincent Atanasoff devised an electronic computer in the late 1930s not for fun or glory, but because he had problems for it to solve. Now, the recent passage of the 50th anniversary of a later device has been puffed up to look like the "birthday of the computer."

Not so.

The Atanasoff-Berry Computer, said colleague Allen R. Mackintosh, is comparable to the Wright brothers' aircraft.

"The ABC first demonstrated in 1939 may not have been much of a computer, just as the Wrights' model was not much of an airplane, but it opened the way."

The calculating machine built in basement at Iowa State University was completed in 1939. John V. Atanasoff, II sees his father's invention as ranking so high in importance that it may not yet be fully understood. Despite Gates and Jobs. Its place in education is certainly not yet appreciated, he says. Physicists, scholars, historians and the inventor's son look at the subsequent changes the computer has wrought.

"I think my dad, myself, and certainly some of the more sophisticated scientific community have just never fathomed the tremendous impact that

the computer has had, how it is embedded in our everyday life," John Atanasoff said in a telephone interview. "It is a question of whether it is more important today to learn to use a computer or to do something else - talk, write...

"Maybe the Four Rs today are really Reading, 'Riting, 'Rithmetic and the computeR!"

The rude but operative electronic device which Professor Atanasoff and Clifford Berry made at Iowa State University in 1939 was not fully developed because the professor was busy with World War II.

Atanasoff ultimately was recognized as the true father of the electronic digital computer, because -- while he was busy with other things -- a major corporation took another one to court.

Iowa State University, which frankly did not at the time grasp the import of the work their physics professor had done, later strove to make things right with the scientific records, with textbooks and with history.

Atanasoff built the device in the basement of the university's physics building with the collaboration of graduate student Clifford Berry. In November 1939 they demonstrated its ability to expand manyfold the power of physical computation while removing the drudgery.

Imperfect and still in progress, the machine was totally different from and 1,000 times more accurate than the then-reigning Vannevar Bush differential analyzer which did calculus by rotating gears and shafts. Atanasoff based his work on a binary system, working in logic rather than enumeration. The electronic computer operated primarily by means of electron devices such as vacuum tubes; later with transistors and now, microchips. Not computer parts, but electrons, do most of the moving.

Dr. Atanasoff left the patent application for the computer in the hands of Iowa State University attorneys and went off on government assignment in Washington in September 1942. The attorneys never filed the patent application, and the Atanasoff-Berry Computer was stored in the physics building's basement, gradually cannibalized without the inventor's knowledge.

When Atanasoff and Berry were working at Ames, John W. Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert were constructing a computation device at the Moore School of Electrical Engineering at the University of Pennsylvania.

Mauchley and Atanasoff met in late 1940. Their common interest in computers led to an invitation from Atanasoff and considerable correspondence. Mauchley journeyed to the Ames campus in June 1941 and stayed for nearly a week. He was allowed to work with the nearly-completed ABC machine and to read and make notes from Atanasoff's writings.

Mauchley wrote to a colleague later the same month and to Atanasoff in September of his interest in the ABC, and his inclination to incorporate some of its features into his own work. Mauchley and Eckert did adapt the basic ABC principle of electronic digital computing into their bigger, faster ENIAC, the first general-purpose computer.

Allan R. Mackintosh, was Professor of experimental solid state physics at the University of Copenhagen, until his recent death in an auto accident. He wrote on Atanasoff's work for Scientific American and Physics Today. I interviewed him for a magazine article (Computer Digest) while he was doing a guest stint at the University of California, Berkeley.

"The ABC opened the way to the computers we have today," he said. "The one I have sitting on my desk now is just a natural development of Atanasoff's work, employing the same principles of logic."

If Atanasoff and his graduate assistant "opened the way," Mauchley and Eckert were prepared to walk right through.

The pair applied for a patent on their ENIAC work in 1947. It was issued in 1964 and owner Sperry Rand began to collect royalties. When Honeywell declined to pay because they knew of the earlier work by Atanasoff, Sperry brought suit. The Honeywell lawyers consulted with Dr. Atanasoff, and called him as a witness in the 1971-72 trial in Minneapolis.

Investigative reporter (and Iowan) Clark R. Mollenhoff told the story in his 1988 book, "Atanasoff, Forgotten Father of the Computer." He described the trial process and its cast, including the impressive U.S. District Judge Earl R. Larson who laboriously informed himself on the technology involved in the case. Judge Larson had a reputation for hard-working thoroughness and for a rarity of reversal on appeal; a combination which should have made the Sperry Rand forces stop and think.

Judge Larson, in fact, found that Mauchley and Eckert "did not themselves first invent the automatic electronic digital computer, but instead derived that subject matter from one Dr. John Vincent Atanasoff."

Iowa State University Associate Professor of Physics John Hauptman is an enthusiast about the Atanasoff triumph, and has read many of the trial records. They show that Mauchley changed his testimony under oath three times, Hauptman said. Mauchley testified, for example, that he had never learned anything from Atanasoff, despite the existing correspondence to the contrary.

"It was a very shameful display," Hauptman told me during an interview at Iowa State.

The trial lasted 135 working days, filled more than 20,000 pages of transcript with the testimony of 77 witnesses. Judge Larson declared the patent for the ENIAC invalid, largely because of its derivation from Atanasoff. Sperry apparently set the judge's reputation above financial interests and did not appeal.

Watergate swept the computer decision from the headlines, and the textbooks and scientific literature are only gradually being corrected to conform with the facts. The Associated Press and others do not seem to have gotten the message, judging by recent newspaper stories. Present-day money apparently outranks existing historical data.

The Smithsonian Institution's "Information Age" exhibition, for instance, was approached early on about its initial slovenly treatment of the ABC. The presentation was adapted to carry complete information, referring to the Atanasoff-Berry Computer as "the first electronic computer" and credits the ABC with providing the basic principles for the ENIAC.

Jon Eklund, Smithsonian curator of computers and information technology, feels that the title "first computer" of any kind must be divided and may even go back as far as Pascal in the 17th century.

"Each one did a remarkable job," Eklund told me. "One of the things that, to me, is remarkable about Atanasoff and Clifford Berry is that they were able to do (what they did) without a whole lot of money and facilities. I mean, they just cobbled away out there in Ames ... "

John Hauptman cited the plaque on the outside wall of the physics building which commemorates the "cobbling" of Atanasoff and Berry. "The first electronic digital computer was invented in the basement of this (physics) building..." it reads.

"I came here from Berkeley," Hauptman said. "You know Berkeley must have 20 Nobel prizes and they are proud of them; poets, physicists, chemists... When I found out Atanasoff's story and read his paper... It occurred to me that if Atanasoff had been at Berkeley in 1939 (with the Atanasoff-Berry Computer) he would have gotten a Nobel prize right away. Berkeley would not have waited a minute before going after a Nobel Prize and becoming known as the birthplace of the electronic digital computer. Here at Iowa State, it was just dropped. I sort of criticize Iowa for being too polite; not pushy enough."

Hauptman admitted that in 1939 the farm applications of the computer were not even dreamed of, and that someone may have thought, "My six-year-old can add; what do we need with this thing?"

"Of course, we now have fifty years of hindsight," he admitted. "At the time it was just some funny gadget that most people would not recognize as useful at all."

The extent of that usefulness was a surprise to the inventor himself, according to his son.

John Atanasoff II, is president of Cybernetics Products, Inc. of New Jersey, which works in high-resolution (eight to ten thousand lines) film special effects, and of Advanced Technology Industries, computerizing routing devices for, among other things, printed circuits.

He said in a telephone interview that his father's pragmatic approach to the ABC extended to his 30-some completed patents, and to some ideas he still thinks about. Retired and ailing, Atanasoff senior lived in Rockville, MD until his death at 91.

"I think clearly my dad was really shocked by the impact the computer has had on the industrial and academic worlds," said the younger Atanasoff. "He originally conceived it to solve significant mathematical and scientific problems, but I think if there was anything that would have surprised him -- and it certainly surprised me! was the impact it had on the world.

His father was always very practical, said John Atanasoff. He would apply his skills to whatever he believed was sound, regardless of precedent.

"For example one of his parallel interests was the breaking down of present-day alphabets and languages into simplified, clarified forms that would be readily computed and - eventually, although he might not have thought this far into it - telecommunicated.

The inventor had hopes for an easy form of the difficult English language to combat the appalling illiteracy rate, said his son. This is not a new project, he added, but one which began long ago and still occupied his father's time when he felt up to it.

"In fact, he had a letter on the subject from George Bernard Shaw back in the 1930s."

No, his father did not have an apprentice, said John Atanasoff, but "at one time he wanted me to donate one of my children to learn his alphabet... so that he would have someone to work on it from the start..."

The computing community with its own way of communing, may move in a similar direction, John Atanasoff surmised, because, "if you think about it, computerese is sort of becoming a universal language, like the language of mathematics -- certainly a very precise way of presenting or manipulating data."

Email Jo Campbell