webber@athos.rutgers.edu (Bob Webber) (04/11/90)
> dsill@ophiuchi.nswc.navy.mil (Dave Sill) Fri Mar 30 07:50:30 1990 writes: >[This thread started with the claim that the need to process U.S. >census data was the raison d'etre of the computing industry. I'm >directing followups to comp.misc because there's no comp.history and >it certainly doesn't belong in misc.consumers.] >Actually, Dr. John Atanasoff of Iowa State was first with the >Atanasoff-Berry Computer (ABC). There was a lawsuit a few years ago >that settled this, and several books were published on the subject. >Mauchly, I believe, worked with Atanasoff and plagiarized his work. >... A lawsuit is not a good way to figure history. Indeed, what the lawsuit actually claimed to demonstrate was that the patent claims on the ENIAC were too sweeping and thus invalidated the ENIAC's patent. There was significant economic motivation behind the ruling since if it had gone the other way, IBM and various other companies would have ended up paying royalties to UNIVAC (then holder of the patent). There can be little doubt that the ENIAC was a novel and interesting machine and would have been of great interest at the time even if the ABC work had been better publicized. On the other hand, if the ABC work had been better publicized, we might not have had to wait so long before seeing further progress along the lines it developed (hard to tell since the interim was dominated by war-time). The claim that the computing resulted from the Census industry was doubtless referring to punched card technology that substantially predated the ABC work (the ABC work died with the beginning of WWII whereas Hollerith was designing punched card machines for the Census bureau in the 19th century -- incidently, Hollerith's company was bought out by what later became IBM, a company that I understand is still involved in the computer industry). Initially introduced for census work, the machines quickly swept bureaucracies everywhere. As these machines became more sophisticated, they were used for scientific calculations as well. Indeed there was a major effort underway in collecting a number of math tables and such on punched cards at the time of the ENIAC work. -- BOB (webber@athos.rutgers.edu ; rutgers!athos.rutgers.edu!webber)