Technology History | Physics Hall, Ames — The Machine a Court Called First

A federal judge in Minnesota spent 248 pages deciding who invented the electronic computer, and the answer he gave points at a basement in Ames. John Vincent Atanasoff taught physics and mathematics at Iowa State, and between 1939 and 1942 he and a graduate student named Clifford Berry built a machine in the basement of Physics Hall. It used binary arithmetic, electronic switching and a rotating drum of capacitors that refreshed itself — a memory design recognisable in principle to anyone who has met dynamic RAM. It also could not be programmed. The machine solved systems of linear equations and did nothing else, which is the qualifier that has to travel with every claim made about it. They never patented it, they both left for war work in 1942, and the machine was eventually broken up. One reason it was not kept, according to the Computer History Museum, is that it was too wide to fit through a standard door. The court case came thirty years later. Sperry Rand held the ENIAC patent, granted in 1964, and was charging the industry royalties on electronic data processing; Honeywell challenged it, pointing at Atanasoff's earlier work and at the fact that John Mauchly had visited Ames in 1941 and studied the machine closely. Judge Earl Larson ruled on 19 October 1973 that the ENIAC patent was invalid and that Mauchly had derived his basic ideas from Atanasoff. Read that carefully, because it is routinely over-read. A patent case decides patent questions, and this one also turned on the ENIAC having been in public use more than a year before the application was filed. The judgment named Atanasoff; it did not settle the history, and it did not make a non-programmable equation solver into the ancestor of everything. What it did do was put electronic computing into the public domain and end the royalties. Atanasoff received the National Medal of Technology in 1990 and died in 1995, aged 91. Physics Hall still stands on Osborn Drive. The machine in the photograph is not the original but a working reconstruction, built at Iowa State between 1994 and 1997, slightly smaller than the machine it copies, and displayed in the lobby of the Durham Center a short walk away. Sources: Computer History Museum; Iowa State University's Atanasoff archive and 1997 replica announcement; English Wikipedia on Honeywell v. Sperry Rand; Smithsonian. Photo: User:Manop, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.