June 14, 1941 John Mauchly met John Atanasoff and the history of computers has changed. It wasn’t their first meeting. It was the second. They had met a few months earlier, in Philadelphia, in December 1940 when Atanasoff had told Mauchly the mysterious machine he was building. A computer, in fact. Now the history of computing is full of firsts, but the mysterious machine in Atanasoff seems to really be considered the first digital computer. Although its inventor never finished building it because in December 1941 the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor and the United States also found itself in World War II.
in conclusion the machine was called ABC, Atanasoff Berry Computer: Berry stood for Clifford Berry, an engineering student that Professor Atanasoff had chosen to carry out his dream. He was born in 1903 in Hamilton, New York, the son of Ivan Atanasov who in turn had arrived in the United States, with an uncle, when he was just one year old, after his parents in Bulgaria had been killed in the war with Turkey. changed their surname upon arrival at Ellis Island). John Atanasoff had been an excellent math student and after graduation from the University of Iowa offered him to be a teacher. Here he made the ABC which is considered the first digital computer. It wasn’t a computer like the ones we use: it weighed 320 kilos, contained 1.6 kilometers of cables, and was the size of a desk. And then it wasn’t a computer capable of doing everything (general purpose) like ours, but only one thing: solving a certain number of equations at the same time. Yet the ABC already had three characteristics that will later be adopted by other computers: it represented numbers according to the binary system of digital (0 and 1); carried out operations using electronic and non-mechanical tools; finally, it kept memory separate from computational capacity.
In that meeting on June 14, 1941 in Ames, Mauchly was very impressed: it lasted four days and Mauchly, who was a physicist, analyzed at length the prototype and the manuscripts of Atanasoff. Until then, Mauchly, who had invented a weather forecasting machine, had never thought of a digital computer. With the outbreak of the Second World War Atanasoff was called by the Navy; before leaving for Washington DC he asked the University of Iowa to patent the ABC but they did not. and a few months later he wrote to Atanasoff saying he wanted to develop that idea and asking if he had any objection. Mauchly a few months after the meeting wrote to Atanasoff saying he wanted to carry on his colleague’s intuition by asking if he had anything against it. But in the various meetings the two had in Washington in 1943 he never said that he was making a computer that was the evolution of ABC. He worked on it with a fellow engineer from the University of Pennsylvania and in December 1945 it was ready: it was called ENIAC and it was programmable, electronic and capable of doing a wide range of operations (general purpose). The ENIAC has a place of honor in the history of computers but in 1973, following a very long litigation, a judge ruled that the ENIAC patent was invalid because “everything was born from the intuition of John Vincent Atanasoff”.
This is not the space to analyze the merit of the dispute, but it is significant that on December 13, 1990, the President of the United States George HW Bush awarded Atanasoff the Medal of Valor for Technology. Five years later he died and after another two years the University of Iowa completed the feat of building the ABC computer that had never been finished. It is there, on the first floor of the Durahm Center for Computation with the manuscripts of its inventor where you can read about that winter night of 1937 in which Atanasoff, frustrated by the failures recorded up to then, got into his car and started driving without half. After nearly three hundred kilometers he stopped at a kind of motorway restaurant in Illinois where he ordered a bourbon: legend has it that at that moment his thoughts cleared up and he saw for the first time what he was doing. A computer.
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