ATANASOFF, JOHN VINCENT 1904-1982

ELECTRICAL ENGINEER, MATHEMATICIAN,
PHYSICIST

Computer Pioneer

John Vincent Atanasoff invented the first automatic digital computer, but before he perfected his design, others had developed computers that were more sophisticated than his, and his contribution to computer technology was nearly forgotten.

Early Years

Atanasoff became interested in calculating at the age of nine, when his father, an electrical engineer, gave him a slide rule. After receiving a B.S. in electrical engineering at the University of Florida in 1925, Atanasoff earned an M.A. in mathematics at Iowa State University (1926) and a Ph.D. in physics from the University of Wisconsin (1930).

Inventing a Computer

Atanasoff encountered the limits of existing calculating instruments as he worked on the extensive calculations for his doctoral dissertation on the electrical properties of helium. As a professor of mathematics and physics at Iowa State, he began to work on an improved calculating machine during the 1930s. In 1937 he developed the idea for an electronic digital machine that would use binary numbers (base two) instead of the traditional decimal (base ten) of existing calculating machines; it would have memory, and unlike existing analog calculators it would operate by direct logic rather than by analogy. In 1939 Atanasoff and his assistant, Clifford Berry, built a prototype of the Atanasoff Berry Computer (ABC) that impressed Iowa State enough to earn them a university grant of $850 to build a fully operating machine.

Problems

Completed in late 1941, the ABC was too slow. It could not be programmed, and it contained systematic errors. While Atanasoff could have improved the machine, the outbreak of World War II took him away from the project. He spent the war years working for the Naval Ordnance Laboratory in Washington, D.C., and stayed on after the war. In 1946 he was asked to build a computer for the navy, but the project was canceled after a few months, when the army revealed the existence of the ENIAC computer, developed for them by J. Presper Eckert, Jr., and John Mauchly. Although Mauchly had examined the ABC and talked to Atanasoff about his invention, the ENIAC—which was in fact more sophisticated and efficient than the ABC—was also said to be different from the ABC. Eckert and Mauchly were widely credited with inventing the first automatic digital computer.

Recognition

Amid the confusion of Atanasoff's leaving Iowa State for war work, the university had never completed the patent application for the ABC, and Atanasoff's contribution to computer history was largely ignored or forgotten until the 1970s. The Sperry Rand Corporation, which had bought the patent to the ENIAC, was charging royalties to other computer manufacturers. Honeywell refused to pay, claiming that the Sperry Rand patent was not valid, since ENIAC was not an original invention but was derived from the ABC and from information Atanasoff passed to John Mauchly in the early 1940s. Sperry Rand sued Honeywell. On 17 October 1973, after six years of litigation, a U.S. District Court judge ruled, "Eckert and Mauchly did not themselves first invent the automatic electronic digital computer, but instead derived that subject matter from one Dr. John V. Atanasoff."