1939 AD |
|
| It is said that history is written by the victors. (It is also
said that those who fail to learn the lessons of history are doomed to repeat them -- this
is particularly true in the case of history courses at high school.) When one is considering events that occurred only a few decades in the past, however, it would not be unreasonable to expect s aid events to be fairly well-documented, thereby allowing one to report: "This person definitely invented this thing at this time." Sad to relate, this is not always the case as we shall see..... |
We now turn our attention to an American mathematician and
physicist, John Vincent Atanasoff, who has the dubious honor of being known as the man who
either did or did not construct the first truly electronic special-purpose
digital computer. A lecturer at Iowa State College (now Iowa State University), Atanasoff was disgruntled with the cumbersome and time-consuming process of solving complex equations by hand. Working alongside one of his graduate students (the brilliant Clifford Berry), Atanasoff commenced work on an electronic computer in early 1939, and had a prototype machine by the autumn of that year. |
|
| a | ||
| In the process of creating the device, Atanasoff and Berry evolved a number of ingenious and unique features. For example, one of the biggest problems for computer designers of the time was to be able to store numbers for use in the machine's calculations. Atanasoff's design utilized capacitors to store electrical charge that could represent numbers in the form of logic 0s and logic 1s. The capacitors were mounted in rotating bakelite cylinders, which had metal bands on their outer surface. These cylinders, each approximately 12 inches tall and 8 inches in diameter, could store thirty binary numbers, which could be read off the metal bands as the cylinders rotated. | ||
| a | ||
| Input data was presented to the machine in the form of punched cards, while intermediate results could be stored on other cards. Once again, Atanasoff's solution to storing intermediate results was quite interesting -- he used sparks to burn small spots onto the cards. The presence or absence of these spots could be automatically determined by the machine later, because the electrical resistance of a carbonized spot varied from that of the blank card. | Some references report that Atanasoff and Berry had a fully working model of their machine by 1942. However, while some observers agreed that the machine was completed and did work, others reported that it was almost completed and would have worked, while still others stated that it was just a collection of parts that never worked. So unless more definitive evidence comes to light, it's a case of: "You pays your money and you takes your choice." | |
| a | |
|
|
| These notes are abstracted from the book Bebop BYTES Back (An Unconventional Guide to Computers) Copyright Information |
|
