🚀 go-pugleaf

SEWALL@UCONNVM.UCONN.EDU (Murph Sewall) writes:

>On 7 Sep 92 23:55:42 GMT Jake Blues said:
>>	Hello all.  I remember reading that there was some dispute as to
>>who invented the digital computer, and that a court case was ongoing that
>>could have wide-reaching consequences to the industry.  Does anyone have
>>any more info on that?  Has the court case been resolved?  Who won?

>Seriously, I've always considered the Jacquard Loom the first digital
>computer, but someone can perhaps find an earlier example.  The earliest
>"electronic brain" I know of was the ENIAC project in 1946 which was an
>example of your tax dollars at work.  I believe that technology was an
>is available to almost anyone.

The British Collossus computer built by Turing in 1943 was before
ENIAC, but it is now fairly widely accepted that the first
*electronic* digital computer was developed by J.V. Atanasoff and C.E.
Berry at Iowa University in 1939-1942.  (mechanical adders and
multipliers are far older and electro-mechanical devices were already
in use at that time).

It used binary arithmetic, dynamic memory (wheels of capacitors that
were refreshed on every revolution), binary punched cards for
temporary storage and decimal punched cards for input/output. It was
not programmable as such, being constructed to solve linear equation
systems. Due to the unreliability of the card system (one error every
10^4-10^5 operations) it was unable to solve very large systems
reliably, but by re-computation you could solve medium sized equation
systems. The project was abandoned when the war started and both
designers joined the army, but it influenced the design of ENIAC.

	Torben Mogensen (torbenm@diku.dk)

P.S.
The information above is from an article by Allan R. Mackintosh in
Physics Toda, March 1987.