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John Vincent Atanasoff

 
Britannica Concise Encyclopedia: John Vincent Atanasoff
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(born Oct. 4, 1903, Hamilton, N.Y., U.S. — died June 15, 1995, Frederick, Md.) U.S. physicist. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin. With Clifford Berry, he developed the Atanasoff-Berry Computer (1937 – 42), a machine capable of solving differential equations using binary arithmetic. In 1941 he joined the Naval Ordnance Laboratory; he participated in the atomic bomb tests at Bikini Atoll (1946). In 1952 he established the Ordnance Engineering Co., which he later sold to Aerojet Engineering Corp. In 1973, after a judge voided a patent owned by Sperry Rand Corp. on ENIAC, the Atanasoff-Berry Computer was credited as the first electronic digital computer.

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Scientist: John Vincent Atanasoff
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American physicist and computer pioneer (1904–1995)

Atanasoff was born in Hamilton, New York, and educated at the universities of Florida, Iowa, and Wisconsin, where he gained his PhD in 1930. He taught at the Iowa State University from 1930 until 1942, when he moved to the Naval Ordnance Laboratory at White Oak, Maryland. After World War II, Atanasoff worked for various technical companies, eventually serving as president of Cybernetics Inc from 1961 until 1982.

The son of a Bulgarian immigrant who was an electrical engineer, Atanasoff was introduced to calculation at the age of nine when his father gave him a slide rule. This was of little use when, in 1930, he was trying to complete his thesis on the electrical properties of helium. Not even a desk calculator could significantly lighten the extensive computations. He began to think about how things could be improved. By 1937 he had opted for a machine that operates digitally, uses capacitors to store binary numbers, and calculates by logic circuits. Working with his assistant, Clifford Berry, Atanasoff built a prototype in 1939 of the suitably named ABC (Atanasoff-Berry Computer). This was good enough to raise sufficient funds to build an operating machine, which was completed in 1942.

Although the ABC was the first device to incorporate a number of key notions, it was unsatisfactory as a working machine. It was slow, could not be programmed, had to be controlled at all times, and suffered from a number of systematic errors. Clearly, it could be improved but the outbreak of war in 1942 took Atanasoff away to other duties. By the time he was free to work on the ABC other workers had seized the initiative. Atanasoff's work long lay forgotten.

This was corrected in a 1973 court case involving two American companies. Sperry Rand had bought the patent to ENIAC and were seeking to charge royalties to other computer manufacturers. Honeywell Inc resisted, claiming that ENIAC was derived from the ABC and from information passed to ENIAC's designer, John Mauchly, by Atanasoff in the early 1940s. Atanasoff gave evidence and the judge found that ENIAC was not the first “automatic electronic digital computer,” and that it was “derived from one Dr. John Vincent Atanasoff.”

Biography: John Atanasoff
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John Atanasoff (1903-1995) was a pioneer in the field of computer science. In the late 1930s, while teaching at Iowa State University, he designed and built an electronic computing machine with one of his graduate students, Clifford Berry. The Atanasoff-Berry Computer (ABC) was probably the first machine to use vacuum tubes to perform its calculations.

John Vincent Atanasoff was born on October 4, 1903, in Hamilton, New York. He was the son of Ivan (John) Atanasoff, a Bulgarian immigrant who worked as a mining engineer, and an American mother, who taught school. Atanasoff became interested in calculating devices at an early age - he began studying his father's slide rule when he was only nine, and read technical books on mathematics, physics, and chemistry. He decided to be a theoretical physicist while in high school, and went on to the University of Florida, obtaining a degree in electrical engineering. He then received a graduate assistantship at Iowa State College (now Iowa State University), earning a master's degree in mathematics, with a minor in physics, in 1929. Atanasoff completed his doctoral work at the University of Wisconsin, and received his Ph.D. in 1930. He then returned to Iowa State to teach both physics and mathematics.

Constructed a Calculating Machine

Atanasoff's interest in building a calculating machine arose from his need to solve partial differential equations without doing the number crunching by hand, a very slow method. He decided that his machine would have to use base two, in which the only two digits are zero and one, a convention that may be represented electronically in a number of different ways. In particular, the machine that Atanasoff and Berry built did arithmetic electronically, using vacuum tubes to perform the arithmetic operations and capacitors to store the numbers. Numbers were input with punched cards. The primary innovation was that numbers in the computer were digital, and not analog, in nature. The difference between an analog computer - several working versions of which existed at the time - and a digital one is that an analog machine stores its data in terms of position, such as the exact degree of rotation of a numbered wheel, but a digital computer stores its data as a series of binary digits, the zeros and ones of base two. Atanasoff claims to have originated the term "analog" in this application.

The Atanasoff-Berry Computer (ABC) was never expanded or used other than as a calculator. Although Atanasoff and Berry had plans to create a larger machine using the ABC as a building block, those plans were set aside because of World War II, and were never resumed. During the war, Atanasoff worked at the Naval Ordnance Laboratory in Maryland. His only connection with computers at this time occurred when the Navy needed a computer and asked Atanasoff to construct it. Eventually, however, the Navy gave up on the project. Atanasoff then left the computer field. In 1952, he started a firm of his own, Ordnance Engineering Corp., in Frederick, Maryland. Four years later, his firm was sold to Aerojet General Corp. Atanasoff became the firm's vice president and manager of its Atlantic division. He retired from Aerojet in 1961 to become a consultant in package handling automation. Atanasoff then founded another company, Cybernetics, Inc., which his son oversaw.

Won Sperry Rand-Honeywell Suit

Atanasoff became involved with computers again in 1971 when a suit was filed by Sperry Rand, which held a patent for the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer (ENIAC) built during the War. The suit alleged that Honeywell had violated the ENIAC patent by not paying Sperry Rand royalties. Honeywell filed a counter-suit charging, among other things, that the inventors of the ENIAC machine were not the inventors of the electronic computer but that Atanasoff was. If accepted by the court, this fact would render the ENIAC patent invalid. The judge handed down his decision on October 19, 1973, finding for Honeywell and also specifically ruling that Atanasoff was the inventor of the electronic computer.

This decision touched off a great deal of controversy. Many people believe that Atanasoff did not really invent the computer but that he was responsible for designing and building a number of early computer components (such as a memory drum). It is recognized that Atanasoff did make significant contributions to the development of the electronic computer despite the fact that he never built a general-purpose computing machine. After his retirement, Atanasoff worked on a variety of projects. Among his completed inventions is a phonetic alphabet for computers. He died on June 15, 1995, in Frederick, Maryland. Atanasoff's honors include, five honorary doctoral degrees, the Navy's Distinguished Civilian Service Award, the Computer Pioneer Medal of the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers, and the Holley Medal of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers. Other honors included the Distinguished Citation of Iowa State University, membership in the Iowa Inventors' Hall of Fame, membership in the Bulgarian Academy of Science, and Bulgaria's highest science award. In 1990, he received the National Medal of Technology from President George Bush.

Further Reading

Shurkin, James, Engines of the Mind: A History of the Computer, W. W. Norton, 1984.

Slater, Robert, Portraits in Silicon, MIT Press, 1987.

New York Times, June 17, 1995, p. A11.

Washington Post, June 19, 1995, p. B4.

Wikipedia: John Vincent Atanasoff
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John Vincent Atanasoff
Born October 4, 1903(1903-10-04)
Hamilton, New York
Died June 15, 1995 (aged 91)
Frederick, Maryland
Citizenship American
Fields Physics
Known for Atanasoff–Berry Computer

John Vincent Atanasoff (IPA: [ata'nasɔf]) (October 4, 1903 – June 15, 1995) was an American physicist. The 1973 decision of the patent suit Honeywell v. Sperry Rand named him the inventor of the first automatic electronic digital computer, a special-purpose machine that has come to be called the Atanasoff–Berry Computer.

The son of a Bulgarian immigrant who became an electrical engineer, Atanasoff held positions as a teaching professor, a governmental wartime research director, and a corporate research executive before being recognized in the 1970s and 1980s for digital electronic computer research he conducted at Iowa State College in the late 1930s and early 1940s.

Contents

Early life and education

John Atanasoff was born on October 4, 1903 in Hamilton, New York to an electrical engineer and a school teacher. Atanasoff's father, Ivan Atanasoff was born in 1876 in the village of Boyadzhik, Ottoman Empire (present-day Bulgaria). While Ivan was still an infant, Ivan's own father was killed by Turkish soldiers after the April Uprising.[1] In 1889, Ivan Atanasoff emigrated to the United States with his uncle. John Vincent Atanasoff's mother, Iva Lucena Purdy, was a teacher of mathematics.

Atanasoff was raised by his parents in Brewster, Florida. At the age of nine he learned to use a slide rule, followed shortly by the study of logarithms, and subsequently completed high school at Mulberry High School in two years. In 1925, Atanasoff received his bachelor of science degree in electrical engineering from the University of Florida, graduating with straight A's.

He continued his education at Iowa State College and in 1926 earned a master's degree in mathematics. He completed his formal education in 1930 by earning a Ph.D. in theoretical physics from the University of Wisconsin–Madison with his thesis, The Dielectric Constant of Helium. Upon completion of his doctorate, Atanasoff accepted an assistant professorship at Iowa State College in mathematics and physics.

Computer development

1997 replica of the Atanasoff-Berry Computer at Durham Center, Iowa State University

Partly due to the drudgery of using the mechanical Monroe calculator, which was the best tool available to him while he was writing his doctoral thesis, Atanasoff began to search for faster methods of computation. At Iowa State, Atanasoff researched the use of slaved Monroe calculators and IBM tabulators for scientific problems. In 1936 he invented an analog calculator for analyzing surface geometry. The fine mechanical tolerance required for good accuracy pushed him to consider digital solutions.

According to Atanasoff, several operative principles of the Atanasoff–Berry Computer (ABC) were conceived by the professor in a flash of insight during the winter of 1937–1938 after a drive to Rock Island, Illinois. With a grant of $650 received in September 1939 and the assistance of his graduate student Clifford Berry, the ABC was prototyped by November of that year.

The key ideas employed in the ABC included binary math and Boolean logic to solve up to 29 simultaneous linear equations. The ABC had no central processing unit (CPU), but was designed as an electronic device using vacuum tubes for digital computation. It also used separate regenerative capacitor memory that operated by a process still used today in DRAM memory.

Intellectual property entanglement

Atanasoff meets Mauchly

John Atanasoff met John Mauchly at the December 1940 meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Philadelphia, where Mauchly was demonstrating his "harmonic analyzer", an analog calculator for analysis of weather data. Atanasoff told Mauchly about his new digital device and invited him to see it. Also during the Philadelphia trip, Atanasoff and Berry visited the Patent Office in Washington, D.C., where their research assured them that their concepts were new. A January 15, 1941 story in the Des Moines Register announced the ABC as "an electrical computing machine" with more than 300 vacuum tubes that would "compute complicated algebraic equations".

In June 1941 Mauchly visited Atanasoff in Ames, Iowa to see the ABC. During his four day visit as Atanasoff's houseguest, Mauchly thoroughly discussed the prototype ABC, examined it, and reviewed Atanasoff's design manuscript in detail. Up to this time Mauchly had not proposed a digital computer. In September 1942 Atanasoff left Iowa State for a wartime assignment as Chief of the Acoustic Division with the Naval Ordnance Laboratory (NOL) in Washington D.C. He entrusted his patent application for the ABC to Iowa State College administrators. It was never filed.

Mauchly visited Atanasoff multiple times in Washington during 1943 and discussed Atanasoff's computing theories, but did not mention that he was working on a computer project himself until early 1944.[2] John Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert's construction of ENIAC, the first general purpose electronic computer, during 1943–1946 was to lead to a legal dispute two decades later over who was the actual inventor of the computer.

By 1945 the U.S. Navy, too, had decided to build a large scale computer, on the advice of John von Neumann. Atanasoff was put in charge of the project, and he asked Mauchly to help with job descriptions for the necessary staff. However, Atanasoff was also given the responsibility for designing acoustic systems for monitoring atomic bomb tests. That job was made the priority, and by the time he returned from the testing at Bikini Atoll in July 1946, the NOL computer project was shut down due to lack of progress, again on the advice of von Neumann.

Patent disputed

For a more detailed account, see Honeywell v. Sperry Rand.

Mauchly and Eckert applied for a patent on a "General-Purpose Electronic Computer" in 1947, which was finally granted in 1964. The rights to the patent had been sold in 1951 to Remington Rand (to become Sperry Rand); that company created a subsidiary (Illinois Scientific Developments) to start demanding royalty payments from other equipment manufacturers in the electronic data processing industry in the 1960s.

In June 1954 IBM patent attorney A.J. Etienne sought Atanasoff's help in breaking an Eckert-Mauchly patent on a revolving magnetic memory drum, having been alerted by Clifford Berry that the ABC's revolving capacitor memory drum may have constituted prior art. Atansoff agreed to assist the attorney, but IBM ultimately entered a patent-sharing agreement with Sperry Rand, the owners of the Eckert-Mauchly memory patent, and the case was dropped.[3]

On May 26, 1967, computer manufacturer Honeywell Inc. filed a lawsuit against Sperry Rand in U.S. District Court in Minneapolis, Minnesota challenging the validity of the ENIAC patent. The trial, one of the longest and most expensive in the federal courts to that time, began on June 1, 1971, lasted until March 13, 1972, had 77 witnesses, plus 80 depositions and 30,000 exhibits. Atanasoff's machine was introduced as prior art.

The case was legally resolved on October 19, 1973 when U.S. District Judge Earl R. Larson held the ENIAC patent invalid, ruling that the ENIAC derived many basic ideas from the Atanasoff-Berry Computer. Judge Larson explicitly stated, "Eckert and Mauchly did not themselves first invent the automatic electronic digital computer, but instead derived that subject matter from one Dr. John Vincent Atanasoff".

Sperry declined to appeal the decision in Honeywell v. Sperry Rand, but the decision received little publicity at the time, perhaps because it was overshadowed by the Watergate era "Saturday Night Massacre" firing of special prosecutor Archibald Cox by President Richard Nixon the next day. Despite the uncontested legal decision, some computer history publications continued to represent the ENIAC, rather than the ABC, as the first electronic digital computer.

Postwar life

Following World War II Atanasoff remained with the government and developed specialized seismographs and microbarographs for long-range explosive detection. In 1952 he founded and led the Ordnance Engineering Corporation, selling the company to Aerojet General Corporation in 1956 and becoming Aerojet's Atlantic Division president.

In 1960 Atanasoff and his wife Alice moved to their hilltop farm in New Market, Maryland for their retirement. In 1961 he started another company, Cybernetics Incorporated, in Frederick, Maryland which he operated for 20 years. He was gradually drawn into the legal disputes being contested by the fast growing computer companies Honeywell and Sperry Rand. Following the resolution of Honeywell v. Sperry Rand, which named Atanasoff the inventor of the automatic electronic digital computer, Atanasoff was warmly honored by Iowa State College, which had since become Iowa State University, and more awards followed.

Atanasoff died in 1995 of a stroke at his home after a lengthy illness. He is buried in Pine Grove Cemetery in Mount Airy, Maryland.

Honors and distinctions

Monument to John Atanasoff in Sofia, in his ancestral Bulgaria

Atanasoff's first national award for scientific achievements was the Order of Saints Cyril and Methodius, First Class, Bulgaria's highest scientific honor bestowed to him in 1970, before the 1973 court ruling.[4]

In 1990, President George H. W. Bush awarded Atanasoff the United States National Medal of Technology, the highest U.S. honor conferred for achievements related to technological progress.[5]

Other distinctions awarded to Atanasoff include:

Named after Atanasoff

See also

Sources

  1. ^ Atanasoff, J.V. The Beginning. Sofia: Narodna Mladezh Publishers, 1985. (Bulgarian version of his 1984 paper) Foreword in English
  2. ^ Mollenhoff, pages 62–66.
  3. ^ Mollenhoff, pages 81–86.
  4. ^ a b Prof. Kiril Boyanov. John Vincent Atanasoff – The Inventor of the First Electronic Digital Computing.
  5. ^ "Honoring Dr. John Atanasoff on the One Hundredth Anniversary of His Birth". Congressional Record - Extensions of Remarks. October 30, 2003. pp. E2159-2160. http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/granule/CREC-2003-10-30/CREC-2003-10-30-pt1-PgE2159-2. Retrieved 2009-05-15. 
  6. ^ a b Yambol Province Government. Website (in Bulgarian)
  7. ^ SCAR Composite Antarctic Gazetteer entry
  8. ^ Minor Planet Names: Alphabetical List
  9. ^ Lutz D. Schmadel. Dictionary of Minor Planet Names. Springer-Verlag Telos, 2000. 1319 pp. ISBN 978-3540662921
  10. ^ National Military University Website (in Bulgarian)
  11. ^ John Atanasoff Award
  12. ^ Bestowing the 2005 John Atanasoff Award. Iowa State University website.
  13. ^ John Atanasoff Technical College. Website
  14. ^ The 7th John Atanasoff Tournament. Darik News website (in Bulgarian)
  15. ^ John Atanasoff Professional High School of Electronics, Stara Zagora. Website
  16. ^ John Atanasoff Professional High School of Electronics, Sofia. Website
  17. ^ John Atanasoff Chitalishte, Sofia.
  18. ^ John Atanasoff Chitalishte, Boyadzhik.
  19. ^ Prof. John Atanasoff Primary School, Sofia. Picture
  20. ^ John Atanasoff Private High School, Blagoevgrad. Website
  21. ^ John Atanasoff Professional Technical High School, Kyustendil.
  22. ^ John Atanasoff Professional High School of Economic Informatics, Targovishte. Website
  23. ^ John Atanasoff University Student Computer Club, Plovdiv University. Website
  24. ^ John Atanasoff Street, Yambol addressee.
  25. ^ John Atanasoff Street, Sofia addressee.

References

External links


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