[Leica] Who invented the computer...or is the law an ass?

[photo at frozenlight.eu (Nathan Wajsman)]

Another fascinating snippet from the history of computing--thanks!

Cheers,
Nathan

Nathan Wajsman
Alicante, Spain
http://www.frozenlight.eu
http://www.greatpix.eu
PICTURE OF THE WEEK: http://www.fotocycle.dk/paws
Blog: http://nathansmusings.wordpress.com/

YNWA









On Mar 10, 2013, at 11:09 PM, Herbert Kanner wrote:

> This is probably the last in my series of articles about things in the 
> Computer History Museum.
> 
> During World War II, the army was in a stew about the slow production of 
> ballistics tables for new artillery weapons. The tables were hand 
> calculated by women who had math degrees. John Mauchly and Presper Eckert 
> at the Moore School of Engineering of the University of Pennsylvania 
> invented a computer named ENIAC for producing these tables. It was a fully 
> programmable computer, could calculate anything. Eckert and Mauchly 
> patented it--this in itself is surprising, since it was supported by 
> government money. 
> 
> Eckert and Mauchly went on after the war to found the corporation which 
> sold a computer called UNIVAC. Ultimately, other companies went into the 
> computer business and a lawsuit occurred in 1967 between the UNIVAC 
> company and Honeywell, which refused to pay UNIVAC a license fee. A U.S. 
> District Court decided that the UNIVAC patent was invalid because of 
> never-patented but publicly disclosed prior art: a computer built by Iowa 
> State College physics professor John Vincent Atanasoff  and graduate 
> student John Berry. It was built in the period 1939-1942. For short, it 
> became known as the "ABC Computer". UNIVAC never appealed the decision.
> 
> Now here is what the ABC computer was designed to do. It would solve up to 
> 29 simultaneous linear equations in 29 variables. It would be fed two 
> equations and would eliminate one variable. This process would be 
> (manually) repeated using one of these shortened equations to shorten the 
> next equation. By repeating this process over and over again, the 
> equations would ultimately be solved. Sounds a pain, but far better than 
> trying to solve them by hand. That is all that the machine could do; 
> nothing else. 
> 
> Furthermore, if one wants to nit pick, the ABC Computer converted the 
> numbers to binary and worked with binary arithmetic, whereas the ENIAC 
> worked directly in decimal.
> 
> I suspect that courts are more sophisticated today and would have made a 
> different decision.
> 
> The original computer was too wide to be moved out of a standard door, and 
> ultimately various others at Iowa State liberated its parts. Eventually, 
> it got rebuilt with a slightly smaller case, and is now on loan to the 
> Computer History Museum.
> 
> http://gallery.leica-users.org/v/herbk1/L1002926.jpg.html
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Herbert Kanner
> kanner at acm.org
> 650-326-8204
> 
> Question authority and the authorities will question you.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
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