Just finished Who Invented the Computer, a recent book by Alice Rowe Burks. For those of us who assumed that the modern digital computer, having been primarily funded by the U.S. and British governments, was a public domain idea, there are some eye-opening facts. Here’s the chronology:
1939-42: John V. Atanasoff, a physicist at Iowa State College, works with Clifford Berry, a master’s student, to build a digital vacuum tube computer (Atanasoff-Berry Computer or “ABC”). The project has only paltry funding and is abandoned due to a problem with the punch card input/output system. Atanasoff and Berry wander off to tackle projects related to America’s war with Germany, Italy, and Japan.
1941: John Mauchly, who has been working on weather calculations using analog computers, drives out to Iowa to visit Atanasoff and gets a good look at how digital circuits can be built from analog components. He reads Atanasoff’s big design document and goes home after five days of continuous meetings with Atanasoff and Berry.
1943: vacuum tube Colossus code-breaking computer starts operating at Bletchley Park in England, workplace of Alan Turing, the father of Computer Science
1945: Eckert and Mauchly’s ENIAC is operational, using many of Atanasoff’s ideas without credit
1947: Eckert and Mauchly apply for a patent on fundamental ideas in electronic computing (“ENIAC patent”)
1964: ENIAC patent is issued by the U.S. Patent Office, running through 1981.
1965: Sperry Rand, the owner of the Ecker-Mauchly patents, demands approximately $1 billion in royalties from other computer vendors. IBM is exempt from these demands due to an earlier cross-licensing agreement with Sperry.
1971: Honeywell sues Sperry, asking the Federal court to invalidate Sperry’s patents on the grounds of Atanasoff’s prior art and the more than one year of delay between the customer deliveries of ENIAC and its patent application.
1973: Judge Earl R. Larson rules that the ENIAC was derived from Atanasoff’s innovations, that Sperry’s patents are unenforceable, and that IBM has been violating the Sherman Antitrust Act (i.e., that IBM is a monopoly). Honeywell’s legal costs are estimated to be $3.5 million or roughly 700 times the cost of building the ABC computer.
The story has a number of interesting lessons. First it shows the terrible consequences of being a bit too early. Nobody was interested in Atanasoff’s project in the late 1930s and it did not seem worth funding to the point that minor obstacles such as the punchcard reader problem could be overcome. If Atanasoff had only been a few years later he might have played a major role in massive federally funded projects.
A second lesson from the story is that there isn’t all that much true innovation in the engineering world. People working independently at disparate sites often came up with similar solutions (except for Mauchly, of course, who had the opportunity to stand directly on the shoulders of Atanasoff). Only one team, however, can get a patent and it turned out that this one was mired at the Patent Office for about 20 years following the design of the ENIAC.
Imagine how different the world would be if Sperry had been able to control, through licensing, whether or not the first microprocessors could be built (note: 1968-70 the Air Force funded a fairly powerful 20-bit microprocessor project for the F14A fighter jet, which worked but was kept secret; Intel introduced the 4004 4-bit microprocessor in 1971 for use in desk calculators).
The last half of the book is devoted to an academic bitchfest in which Burks talks about all of the hacks who don’t credit Atanasoff. It is interesting mostly for its discussion of exhibits at the Smithsonian and PBS documentaries. Sperry funded these projects and the non-profits obligingly ignored or downplayed Atanasoff’s contributions in favor of Eckert and Mauchly. The only publication that couldn’t be bought and wouldn’t be intimidated by threats of legal action was … Car and Driver magazine. Atanasoff was a hero to Car and Driver writer Patrick Bedard because he testified that a late night high-speed drive in 1937 in a V8 Ford and a few drinks in a roadhouse in Illinois had inspired a couple of the critical designs in the ABC. Bedard speculated “Atanasoff didn’t get nearly the credit due him because the [court] decision was issued just one day before the Watergrate-inspired ‘Saturday Night Massacre’ and it lacked the combination of inconsequentiality and putrescence necessary to compete for media attention.”
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