🚀 go-pugleaf

dab@moxie.moxie.oswego.edu (David Alan Bozak) writes:

>I was appalled that there was NO mention of Atanasoff.  

The show is titled "The Machine that Changed the World." ENIAC
and its progeny changed the world. Atanasoff's machine didn't.

It doesn't pay to confuse law and politics with history. All the
lawsuit did was invalidate a patent. It didn't change history. They
didn't have to prove that ENIAC's existence depended on Atanasoff's
work; they just had to show that the patent claimed some of his work.

Atanasoff, like several other people, rigged up some vacuum tubes to
do arithmetic.  He didn't make it into a machine that solved real
problems, he didn't compute and publish mathematical tables with it,
he didn't give lectures to others on how to build them, and he didn't
found one of the first commercial companies in a new industry. Nor
was he a cofounder of the ACM.

If Mauchly hadn't visited him, Atanasoff would be even more obscure
than he is now.

>Since Unisys was a sponsor of the show, I suppose I shouldn't have
>been surprised, since they lost a lawsuit over his role in the history
>of computers.  Maybe disappointed is a better word to describe how I
>feel about sponsor influence over content.

I'm not, nor have I ever been, an employee of Unisys, Sperry, Remington
Rand, Engineering Research Associates, or Eckert-Mauchly Computer
Corporation. I'm merely a student of computer history.

Rick Smith, late of the Babbage Institute, arden hills, minnesota