With punch card and whirring motor, a replica of the world's first computer is unveiled in Washington.
by Kenneth Pins
The Des Moines Register
October 9, 1997
(Washington, D.C.) The equation was 9 - (3 x 2) = x.
Switches were flipped, a punch card was inserted and an electric motor turned a drum studded with copper contacts. Numbers were converted to the binary code used in computers.
It was 2 1/2 minutes later when the numbers on a device resembling a car's odometer advanced three clicks, revealing that the answer was 3.
"That's the monitor," joked John Erickson, a member of the Iowa State University team that built the contraption.
This was the first official unveiling of a replica of the world's first computer, which was built at Iowa State nearly 60 years ago, and the demonstration was deemed a success. Forget that the problem was a soft toss that most people could solve in their head in 5 seconds. With cameras running, no one wanted an embarrassing crash.
ISU President Martin Jischke and members of the team that built the machine traveled to the National Press Club in Washington for a demonstration they say proves the Atanasoff Berry Computer, or ABC, was the first working model of the most important invention of the 20th century.
While the 1997 replica is hardly a technical advance -- team member Charles Shorb said that comparable power now fits in a wristwatch and that Pentium chip desktop machines are from a billion to 10 billion times more powerful -- it does solve mathematical equations.
Physics professor John Vincent Atanasoff and graduate student Clifford Berry designed and built the original in the Physics Building at Iowa State from 1939 to 1942. Atanasoff had become frustrated that graduate students were eating up so much time grinding out equations.
Lawsuits over the years established legally that the Atanasoff machine was indeed the first computer, but that has hardly entered the popular imagination. Just a mile from Wednesday's event, the Smithsonian Institution's Information Age exhibit continues to credit a later invention, known as the ENIAC computer, as the first.
Iowa State hopes the replica will bring greater recognition, if not revenue, to the school. The Atanasoff computer was never patented, and neither the family nor the school received royalties. In 1942 Atanasoff was called to Washington to work on the war effort, and Berry left Ames for private industry. The world's first computer, too wide to fit through the door of the room in which it was built, was later torn apart. A surviving drum is on display in the computer memory section of the Smithsonian computer exhibit.
Three of Atanasoff's children -- who played in the basement of the Physics Building while their father worked -- were on hand for the event.
"It was an all-consuming effort," recalled John Atanasoff Jr., who was just 5 when his father was inventing the computer.
The younger Atanasoff, now CEO of a Colorado medical devices company, noted that his parents separated and the children moved to Florida with their mother when the elder Atanasoff came to Washington.
"He was a very intense person. He sent all of his evenings and weekends working on this," said the younger Atanasoff. "It became his sole purpose in life during those years."
JoAnne Gather, the inventor's daughter, recalls waking up in the middle of the night to find her father sitting on his bedside working out problems. "He always had a tablet by his bed," she said. Among her childhood friends was Jane Gilman, daughter of the eminent chemist Henry Gilman, for whom the chemistry building at Iowa State is named. Their fathers were rarely home, but the children would play in the tunnels running beneath the Physics Building. Iowa State now intends to take the replica computer on the road, primarily to display it at alumni events, starting October 22 in Ames. The effort consumed three years and $350,000, but Jischke said it was worth it to clarify history and "to call attention to Iowa State as a very important source of technology."
John Gustafson, one of the leaders of the project, said the replica is "functionally identical" to the computer Atanasoff and Berry built. They had Berry's Master's thesis as a guide. Among the variations is wiring with plastic rather than cloth insulation and Phillips-head screws. The replica is also slightly thinner than the original, so that it can fit through doors. Where the replica will ultimately reside is not certain.