by J.S. Leonard
Daily Staff Writer
Who cares who invented the first computer? Who cares about patents or court decisions? Who cares about new technology -- Microsoft or Windows '96?
Not Delwyn Bluhm and the rest of the team of Iowa State scientists at the Ames Laboratory. While others are celebrating the 50th anniversary of the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer (ENIAC) at the University of Pennsylvania, they are persistently striving to recreate an authentic replica of the Atanasoff-Berry Computer (ABC) built and operated at Iowa State by ISU physics professor John Atanasoff and Clifford Berry in the late 1930s.
Until 1973, the ENIAC was thought to be the first digital computer. It was during that year that a judge decided that the inventor and patent-holder of the ENIAC, John Mauchly, derived most of his ideas from the ABC.
But Bluhm, the director of the ABC Replica Project, say they are not concerned with who did it first.
Bluhm said he thought recreating the ABC would be a great project, as well as a tribute to Atanasoff. The project was first discussed in December of 1993, and construction of the replica is now nearing completion. But the project has not been without obstacles.
The team has to rely on photographs and first hand accounts of the operation of the computer by those who worked on it, or who saw it in action, because ABC was dismantled and discarded during World War II.
"We are re-engineering a device," Bluhm said. "In some cases it's harder to reengineer it than to build it the first time, because we don't know what's there. We know how we might do it today, but we don't know how they did it then."
The team does not want to use any modern equipment, even on parts of the computer that will be hidden from view.
"We want it to look exactly like the original," Bluhm said. "The question is, what about the inside, where people can't see it? We decided to try to make a working model like they would have made it then. We're trying not to substitute unless we have to. If it's not available or it is impossible to recreate something, then we will have to substitute.
The biggest difficulty for the team is obtaining vintage electrical equipment from the 1930s and 1940s that still works.
"Atanasoff seemed to use a lot of telephone type equipment," said John Erickson, the supervisor of the Ames Lab Technical Shop and one of the members of the ABC design team. "If you look at the pictures, the switches obviously come from switchboard equipment of the time. Those are still manufactured. The relays and mechanical things, like terminal boards, are hard to come by."
Vacuum tubes, like the kind used in the original ABC, can often be obtained from antique dealers. Many of them are unused and still in the original boxes.
Last August, Erickson and Dave Birlingmair, manager of mechanical engineering research and development at the Ames Lab and a principal investigator of the project, visited Atanasoff's home to obtain copies of any records that might help them with the design of the computer.
They spent two days copying relevant documentation. They were especially interested in purchase orders that indicate the kinds of equipment Atanasoff and Berry used, as well as some pictures and schematic diagrams of the original computer.
"The Atanasoff family knows that we are trying to recreate, reengineer and build a full-scale, working model," Bluhm said. "They are very supportive."
But even pictures and diagrams have their problems.
"There's a number of subtle things we can't figure out," Birlingmair said. "We can see the decimal readout dials on the photographs, but we don't know how they are incremented and read."
They are also unsure of the type of paper that was used in the electrical card punches on the original device.
"Berry's thesis, which is at the [Parks] library, has a section on one of the cards punched by the machine," Birlingmair said. "That has been helpful."
The ABC, about the size of a large desk, is a lap-top model compared with the ENIAC, which completely filled a large room. But the ABC was not an all-purpose machine like the ENIAC. In theory, the original was capable of solving 29 equations with 29 unknowns. However, it is believed that it was only used to solve from three to five equations during its operation. The ABC team hopes that it can repeat these calculations using the replica, and if successful, the replica will then be permanently turned off and put on display.
"One of the reasons for that is because the safety requirements of that era were completely different than today," Bluhm said. "It has high voltage and mechanical pinchpoints with no guarding. It just couldn't be operated on display. It takes a lot of very talented people hours and hours and hours to run a problem, and it takes a lot of maintenance to keep the device operating properly. We want to prove that it is a working, full-scale replica, and then it will be turned off and never used again."
Eventually, as funds become available, the scientists would like to build three replicas of the ABC.
One will be given to Durham Center. Another will be given to Chuck Durham, the Durham Center's founder. The third will be available on loan to museums around the country.
"This will be excellent exposure for Iowa State University, and the state of Iowa. It [the replica] might go to the Smithsonian for half a year, and then it might go anywhere."
The ABC replica builders hope that the project will be completed in the summer of 1996.
The team members want to get the project done as soon as possible because they are some of the few people left with expertise in vacuum tubes, and "all of us are getting older and may not be available for doing this work," Bluhm said.
Bluhm noted that no matter which computer was first, this year marks the 50th anniversary of the information age Atanasoff helped begin.
"Atanasoff wanted to do his calculations by logical action, rather than by enumeration," Birlingmair said. "He used electronic means to hold his data, which he thought was much faster than mechanical. He decided to work in binary, rather than decimal and he wanted to regenerate his memory often so he didn't lose any information. These four aspects are used in every computer today."
"All the things that Atanasoff envisioned back then, of a digital society, are coming to fruition today," Bluhm said.