by Roger Munns
Associated Press
"I have always taken the position that there is enough credit for everyone in the invention and development of the electronic computer."--John Atanasoff, early developer of the computer
But he was intellectually stuck on the details, so in frustration he got in his car and drove. Fast.
He needed a diversion he said. It was one of the workings of his ingenious mind. Another one was that he didn't bother to sound the trumpets once he made a breakthrough. Instead, he kept on inventing.
Atanasoff worked hard to get his rightful place in history but he was never consumed by the task. If he was ever bitter about spending decades as an asterisk in the story of the computer, he never showed it.
His invention was pirated--so said a federal court in 1973 and the losers didn't appeal--but Atanasoff preferred not to put it that way.
"I have always taken the position that there is enough credit for everyone in the invention and development of the electronic computer," he said.
Atanasoff died last Friday, having never achieved the fame of the two University of Pennsylvania inventors who assembled the ENIAC, J. Presper Eckert and John Mauchly.
There might not have been any fame to go around if Atanasoff hadn't jumped in his car and left the campus of Iowa State College (later Iowa State University) that night in 1937.
He drove and drove, heading east, stopping only when he reached an Illinois roadhouse some 200 miles from home.
"It was extremely cold and I took off my overcoat," he recalled in trial testimony. "I had a very heavy coat, and hung it up, and as the delivery of the drink was made, I realized I was no longer so nervous and my thoughts turned again to computing machines.
"Things seemed to be good and cool and quiet ... I would suspect I drank two drinks perhaps, and then I realized that thoughts were coming good and I had some positive results."
That's for sure.
He resolved to rely on electronic switches, not mechanical ones. He decided to manipulate binary numbers following rules of logic, not direct counting. He also came up with a way of regenerating memory-storing capacitors so they wouldn't lose their charge, a process he called jogging.
"Sometime late in the evening, I got in my car and drove home at a slower rate," he said.
Modern computers continue to manipulate stored binary digits electronically according to rules of logic and to separate computation and regenerative memory.
For the next five years, Atanasoff and research assistant Clifford Berry built the bunk-bed sized Atanasoff Berry Computer using vacuum tubes and other radio parts, and the machine did as it was told, solving linear equations for up to 29 variables.
In a compression of history, here's what happened next. An expert on mines, Atanasoff went to the Naval Ordnance Laboratory in the war effort. He later formed an electronics company, received patents on more than 30 electronic inventions and became well-to-do.