Legends of Technology - Atanasoff, John Vincent | HackTHatCORE

Atanasoff, John Vincent

1903 - 1995

American, Computer Engineer

John V. Atanasoff is considered by many historians to be the inventor of the modern electronic computer. He was born October 4, 1903, in Hamilton, New York. As a young man, Atanasoff showed considerable interest in and a talent for electronics. His academic background (B.S. in electrical engineering, Florida State University, 1925; M.S. in mathe- matics, Iowa State College, 1926; and Ph.D. in experimental physics, University of Wisconsin, 1930) well equipped him for the design of computing devices. He taught mathemat- ics and physics at Iowa State until 1942, and during that time, he conceived the idea of a fully electronic calculating machine that would use vacuum tubes for its arithmetic cir- cuits and would store binary numbers on a rotating drum memory that used high and low charges on capacitors. Atanasoff and his assistant Clifford E. Berry built a successful computer called ABC (Atanasoff-Berry computer) using this design in 1942. (By that time he had taken a war- time research position at the Naval Ordnance Laboratory in Washington, D.C.) The ABC was a special-purpose machine designed for solving up to 29 simultaneous linear equations using an algorithm based on Gaussian elimination to eliminate a specified variable from a pair of equations. Because of inherent unreliability in the system that punched cards to hold the many intermediate results needed in such calcula- tions, the system was limited in practice to solving sets of five or fewer equations. Despite its limitations, the ABC’s design proved the fea- sibility of fully electronic computing, and similar vacuum tube switching and regenerative memory circuits were soon adopted in designing the ENIAC and EDVAC, which unlike the ABC, were general-purpose electronic computers. Equally important was Atanasoff’s use of capacitors to store data in memory electronically: The descendent of his capaci- tors can be found in the DRAM chips in today’s computers. When Atanasoff returned to Iowa State in 1948, he dis- covered that the ABC computer had been dismantled to make room for another project. Only a single memory drum and a logic unit survived. Iowa State granted him a full professorship and the chairmanship of the physics depart- ment, but he never returned to that institution. Instead, he founded the Ordnance Engineering Corporation in 1952, which grew to a 100-person workforce before he sold the firm to Aerojet General in 1956. He then served as a vice president at Aerojet until 1961. Atanasoff then semi-retired, devoting his time to a vari- ety of technical interests (he had more than 30 patents to his name by the time of his death). However, when Sperry Univac (owner of Eckert and Mauchly’s computer patents) began demanding license fees from competitors in the mid- 1960s, the head lawyer for one of these competitors, Hon- eywell, found out about Atanasoff’s work on the ABC and enlisted his aid as a witness in an attempt to overturn the patents. After prolonged litigation, Judge Earl Richard Lar- son ruled in 1973 that the two commercial computing pio- neers had learned key ideas from Atanasoff’s apparatus and writings and that their patent was invalid because of this “prior art.” Atanasoff received numerous awards for his work for the Navy on acoustics and for his pioneering computer work. These awards included the IEEE Computer Pioneer Award (1984) and the National Medal of Technology (1990). In addition, he had both a hall at Iowa State University and an asteroid (3546-Atanasoff) named in his honor. John Atanasoff died on June 15, 1995, in Monrovia, Maryland.

References:

• Burks, A. R., and A. W. Burks. The First Electronic Computer: the Atanasoff Story. Ann Arbor, Mich: University of Michigan Press, 1988.
• Lee, J. A. N. Computer Pioneers. Los Alamitos, Calif.: IEEE Com- puter Society Press, 1995.
• “Reconstruction of the Atanasoff-Berry Computer (ABC).” Avail- able online. URL: http://www.scl.ameslab.gov/ABC/ABC. html. Accessed April 13, 2007.