Joel A. Snow
(Commentary aired on WOI Radio on July 14, 1995)
After researching and pondering this problem to no avail, he hit upon a scheme for such an automatic computing device during a long wandering trip across the Iowa countryside, scribbled down his plan in an Illinois road house, and returned to Ames to embark on the construction of the first electronic digital computer. With help from a bright graduate student, and an expenditure of less that $1,000, an amount close to half of a young professor's salary in those depression years, the device was designed, redesigned, constructed, tested, and it worked.
This achievement was little noted at the time, and after Atanasoff left Iowa State College for the Naval Ordnance Laboratory in 1941, the machine was consigned to oblivion in the Physics Building on campus. For a long time there was also little likelihood that this achievement would be long remembered. The fundamental ideas were pirated away, used as building blocks in the design of subsequent computers during and after World War II, and machines based on Atanasoff's concepts now from part of the bedrock of today's information revolution. The initial credit for inventing the electronic computer went to the purported pirate, John W. Mauchly, who died in 1980, and to J. Presper Eckert, who used the ideas in a wartime device built for computing artillery trajectories, (called ENIAC), which led eventually to UNIVAC.
Atanasoff went on to a highly successful career as an applied scientist, inventor, and entrepreneur, amassing an impressive array of patents covering applications of electronics and applied physics. His pioneering work on the computer reemerged only in the mid 1960s and ultimately became the core of a successful challenge to the basic patents for the electronic digital computer. Due to the passage of time neither Atanasoff nor Iowa State University received financial benefits from this seminal invention. Though honored at the end of his lifetime, including a national medal of technology awarded by President George Bush in 1990, many feel that Atanasoff never received the full measure of recognition due him. Atanasoff died on June 15 at age 91. Curiously, J. Presper Eckert, his remaining rival, died on June 3.
But the story is still not over, for a project is now underway at Iowa State's Ames Laboratory to build a working replica of the original computer, of which only a few fragments now exits. This involves a major technical detective job, since the engineering documentation is not complete. The original model used binary arithmetic and the latest 1930s technology, including data entry from punched cards, rotating drums containing capacitors for regenerative memory, a processing unit made from vacuum tubes, and electric sparks for writing the numerical output on cards.
The machine was designed for the specific mathematical task of solving large sets of simultaneous linear equations, a format into which many problems could be cast. Although pictures, a manuscript, notes and some fading memories exist, detailed plans do not. Most of the needed parts are no longer made. How these parts go together into components and how the components work has to be figured out. The Ames Laboratory team is hard at work and hopes to have a first model put together late next year. Along the way, they are discovering that Atanasoff, who was forced to innovate at every turn, found ingenious practical solutions to challenging design problems that could, themselves, have been patented. And the story is still not over for another reason, for the marriage of the computer concepts pioneered by Atanasoff, with microelectronics technology from condensed matter physics, continue to provide the tools for the worldwide information and communications revolution.
This is Atanasoff's true legacy and the reason that his legend will long endure. Indeed, the present information revolution might have emerged a few years sooner than it did. If the machines had been ready sooner, would we have been?