The Man Who Invented the Computer

Chapter Nine.

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In England, another attempt was being made to build on what had been learned through Colossus without acknowledging that Colossus had ever existed. The third important figure in the Bletchley Park computer story was Max Newman, Alan Turing"s old professor from Cambridge, from whom he had taken a course in the foundations of mathematics in 1935. It was as a result of Newman"s explications of Hilbert"s questions that Turing had begun to think of the search for mathematical truth as a question of "provability" and even as a "mechanical process" (Newman"s words), thereby conceiving his "On Computable Numbers" paper of 1936.

Max Newman was the only son of Herman Neumann, who had been born in 1864 in Bromberg, Germany (now Bydgoszcz, Poland), a town that pa.s.sed back and forth between Poland and Prussia from 1346 until the end of the Second World War. Originally a fishing town, and then a trading town, Bromberg/Bydgoszcz came to have a large Jewish population. Like Max von Neumann of Pecs, Hungary, and Ivan Atanasov of Boyadzhik, Bulgaria, Herman Neumann emigrated to the west, in 1879, not to New York or to Budapest, but to London. There he trained as a bookkeeper, and, like John Atanasoff, at thirty-two he married a schoolteacher, twenty-six-year-old Sarah Pike. Max Neumann was born in 1897. Young Max, like young John Vincent Atanasoff, was publicly educated. World War I brought pain and disruption to the Neumann family-Herman was interned at the beginning, then released, but the experience was so grueling that he and Sarah changed the spelling of their name to "Newman." Nevertheless, Herman returned to Germany after the war and was still there, separated from his family, when he died in 1926. In the meantime, Max attained a scholarship to St. John"s College, Cambridge, in 1915, and though his studies were interrupted by the war (he served as an army paymaster and a schoolmaster), he returned to Cambridge in 1919 and graduated as a mathematician in 1921. He became a fellow of St. John"s in 1923, specializing in topology, which was a more or less unexplored field in England at the time.

It was Newman who had introduced Turing to the Entscheidungsproblem, and it was to Newman that Turing gave the first draft of his paper in the spring of 1936. Newman, who had been interested in mathematical machines since working on his own dissertation in 1921, instantly recognized the brilliance of Turing"s ideas and, more important, understood them, and it was Newman who helped get Turing"s paper into the Proceedings of the London Mathematical Society. Newman was well connected in the mathematical world and in the literary world, too-he was married to writer Lyn Irvine, whose first book was published by Leonard and Virginia Woolf"s Hogarth Press in 1931.

Newman and Lyn followed Turing to Princeton in 1937, and at the Inst.i.tute for Advanced Study Newman worked on a proof for the Poincare Conjecture ("Every simply connected, closed 3-manifold is homeomorphic to the 3-sphere").2 When he thought he had it, he gave a five-hour lecture about it to the a.s.sembled mathematicians, and no listener found a flaw. Unfortunately, it was Newman himself who found the flaw, shortly after returning to England. The conjecture, one of the most famous in theoretical mathematics, was proposed in 1904 and not proven until a hundred years later (by Grigori Perelman, a reclusive Russian mathematician-his proof was accepted in 2006, and he won a million dollars for it from the Clay Mathematics Inst.i.tute). But even though Newman"s Poincare proof failed, he was awarded a fellowship to the Royal Society in 1939.

At the beginning of the war, Max Newman was forty-two, and he and Lyn had two sons. That he felt that he had to send his wife and his half-Jewish children to the United States in 1940 is an index of how uncertain the outcome of the war with Germany seemed at the time. Newman continued at Cambridge and then tried for another fellowship to Princeton, in order to join his family, but finally, in August 1942, he followed many of his friends from Cambridge to Bletchley Park. He was asked to choose between work on Enigma and work on Tunny, and he chose Tunny. Soon after he got there, one of the young mathematicians, William Tutte, came up with an insight into how the Tunny code functioned. Newman began to consider how the repet.i.tive and time-consuming parts of the decoding could be done by machines, and he was put in charge of what came to be known as "the Newmanry." The first machine they came up with was the Heath Robinson, which the members of the Newmanry improved and tinkered with for many months until it was succeeded by Colossus. Newman, like Turing, came to know Tommy Flowers quite well. It eventually became Newman"s job to oversee the Colossus and coordinate how it worked to break Tunny codes.

As soon as the war was over, Newman accepted a position at the University of Manchester, and in 1946 he got a university grant of 35,000 for computer development. He then went back to Princeton for a year, and there met up with von Neumann, who, as we"ve seen, was full of his own computer ideas. Newman, privy to the "First Draft" report, very quickly adopted several of von Neumann"s ideas for the Manchester computer. The chief engineers on the project, who came from the Telecommunications Research Establishment (TRE), were F. C. Williams and Thomas Kilburn, whose experience was in radar and electrical circuit design rather than code breaking-they didn"t even know that Colossus had existed.

F. C. Williams was not at first impressed with the computer lab in Manchester: "It was one room in a Victorian building whose architectural features might best be described as "late lavatorial." The walls were of brown-glazed brick and the door was labelled "Magnetism Room." " Williams was ready to go, though-he brought with him an idea he had already been working on at the TRE, using a cathode ray tube as a storage device. What he then invented was called a Williams tube. The stored program was a "pattern of dots" on the face of the tube. Williams tubes were installed in the first Manchester computer, known as the Manchester Baby, as the repository of the computer"s random access memory.

By that September, Turing had given up on the project at the NPL and was back at Cambridge. There, he wrote two papers, played chess, went for walks, and attended a wide variety of lectures. He gave a lecture in January 1948 ent.i.tled "The Problems of Robots" to the Moral Sciences Club, an a.s.sociation under the auspices of the philosophy department at Cambridge that for many years had offered a venue for the philosophical jousting of thinkers such as Hegel, Wittgenstein, and Karl Popper. At the end of his two Cambridge terms, he wrote a paper ent.i.tled "Intelligent Machinery," in which he at first likened the human brain to a machine "which can be organized by suitable training" and went on to define and give examples of machines that did various forms of work (a bulldozer, a telephone, ENIAC) and to propose an as yet uninvented machine that could do work and could also develop or, you might say, learn-his model was the crypta.n.a.lysis work done by Colossus, though of course he could not mention it.

In early 1948, Max Newman invited Turing to Manchester to work on the computer project there. Since Williams and Kilburn knew nothing about computers and nothing about Colossus, Newman and Turing had to communicate to them what a computer might do and how it might work without describing what they had accomplished at Bletchley Park. But the two engineers were too far along in the project to allow for much input from the two mathematicians-Newman and Turing were interested in theory, but the engineers were more intent upon producing a workable memory system. As with ENIAC and Colossus, time pressures were pushing the project forward in a way that didn"t allow for what Williams and Kilburn considered to be untested ideas, though the pressure this time came not from war, but from the fact that the British government already had a contract with a local weapons and electronics manufacturer to produce the machines once the prototype was built. And Tommy Flowers was having difficulties, too: even though he had invented Colossus, he could not get a computer job, and even though he had done a successful experiment with electronic telephone exchanges in 1939, he made no headway on that front, either.

In the spring of 1949, Atanasoff was invited by General Jacob Devers to leave the Naval Ordnance Lab and move to Fort Monroe, Virginia, as chief scientist for the Army Field Forces. Devers was a West Point contemporary of George Patton who, as an army administrator between the two world wars, had upgraded and reconceived the Field Artillery, then, as an administrator in London, had organized and trained many D-day divisions. His own Sixth Army Group had landed at Ma.r.s.eilles, and according to David P. Colley in the New York Times: The Sixth Army Group reached the Rhine at Strasbourg, France, on Nov. 24 ... His force, made up of the United States Seventh and French First Armies, 350,000 men, had landed Aug. 15 near Ma.r.s.eilles-an invasion largely overlooked by history but regarded at the time as "the second D-Day"-and advanced through southern France to Strasbourg. No other Allied army had yet reached the Rhine, not even hard-charging George Patton"s.

Atanasoff was eager to work with Devers, but the general, now sixty-two, retired at the end of September that year. Atanasoff"s new boss was General Mark Clark, who had run the Italian campaign. Clark had a reputation for being difficult and egocentric. One history relates that during the war, he had a rule that "every [press] release was to mention Clark at least three times on the front page and at least once on all other pages-and the General also demanded that photographs be taken of him only from his left side." Clark killed several of Atanasoff"s projects, and in 1950 Atanasoff returned to the navy to run a program overseeing the development of artillery detonators. Also in 1949, Atanasoff and Lura were divorced, and Atanasoff married Alice Crosby, from Webster City, Iowa, whom he had met through her job in the publications department at the Naval Ordnance Lab.

By mid-1950, Atanasoff felt that his career with the military had reached a dead end, and he was disheartened, too, by the idea that all of his enterprise and inventiveness had gone into making weapons.

In the summer of 1949, Turing was interviewed by a newspaper in relation to a dispute between two other men about machine intelligence and the possibility of a machine having a sensibility. The two men were Norbert Wiener, who had just published Cybernetics, and a neurosurgeon, Geoffrey Jefferson, who gave a speech that attempted to debunk any ideas that a machine could have emotions or self-consciousness and could, therefore, be said to think in a human way (Jefferson was a pioneer of the frontal lobotomy). When Turing was interviewed by the Times (London), he declared that "the university [of Manchester] was really interested in the investigation of the possibilities of machines for their own sake." This was an inflammatory statement on a sensitive topic, especially in light of the scarcity of government funding for research projects. Max Newman had to write to the Times and rea.s.sure readers that the Manchester computer then being developed was intended to have practical applications and was, therefore, both worth building and not intended to usurp human beings.

But Turing was not deflected by the outcry. For the next year, he discussed and pondered the question of thinking-how, indeed, could a machine be said to be "thinking"? How could a human interacting with a machine without knowing it detect whether he was interacting with a machine or with another human? The result was a paper, published in October 1950, ent.i.tled "Computing Machinery and Intelligence." Turing proposed a thought experiment, a situation in which an investigator would question a man (A) and a woman (B) in order to determine which was the man and which was the woman. The man would be told to obstruct the investigator, and the woman would be instructed to help the investigator. They would supply their answers in written form. Once the reader has considered this situation, he is then asked to consider the same situation, but the man has been replaced by a machine. In this situation, Turing asks, will the investigator be able to solve the puzzle correctly more or less often if A is a machine or a man? In other words, Turing proposed, if a machine can imitate a man answering questions well enough so that there is no difference in the ability of the investigator to pa.s.s a given test, then the machine may be said to be thinking. Turing extrapolated from this game to a future date when computers would have sufficient memory storage so as to be able to appear to make decisions and best guesses-at that point, he thought, what they would be doing would be called thinking. More important than answering the question of whether machines might think, though, was the posing of the question. The job of science, Turing felt, was to conjecture, to not be shy about being "heretical."

It was Max Newman who was deflected-for him, the media brouhaha was the beginning of his retreat from computers. According to his son, William Newman, he soon went back to mathematics and focused on his old love, topology. In later years, Max ascribed this withdrawal to the dominance of the engineers, but in addition to that and the public outcry, his son also suspected "that his decision was influenced by his opposition to using the Manchester computer in the development of nuclear weapons." Given his connections to von Neumann, his suspicions were certainly well grounded because von Neumann, of course, was even more involved in the development of the hydrogen bomb than he had been in the development of the atom bomb. He firmly believed that the West had to stay ahead of the Soviet Union, remarking that "with the Russians, it is not a question of whether, but when." According to Norman Macrae, he felt that "all those sitting around the Soviet decision-making tables should know that in the first few minutes of a nuclear war, a bomb would arrive where they were and personally kill all of them."

1. McCartney says six.

2. From the Clay Mathematics Inst.i.tute website: "If we stretch a rubber band around the surface of an apple, then we can shrink it down to a point by moving it slowly, without tearing it and without allowing it to leave the surface. On the other hand, if we imagine that the same rubber band has somehow been stretched in the appropriate direction around a doughnut, then there is no way of shrinking it to a point without breaking either the rubber band or the doughnut. We say the surface of the apple is "simply connected," but that the surface of the doughnut is not. Poincare, almost a hundred years ago, knew that a two dimensional sphere is essentially characterized by this property of simple connectivity, and asked the corresponding question for the three dimensional sphere (the set of points in four dimensional s.p.a.ce at unit distance from the origin). This question turned out to be extraordinarily difficult, and mathematicians have been struggling with it ever since."

Chapter Nine.

By the spring of 1947, Mauchly and Eckert had not yet filed the ENIAC patents, which their original agreement with the University of Pennsylvania had given them rights to. That April, they met with von Neumann, Goldstine, Dean Prender of the Moore School, and Irven Travis, the man who had first declared the new, more restrictive patent policy. Ostensibly, the meeting was to discuss potential EDVAC patents; von Neumann brought a lawyer with him. It was at this meeting that the university and Mauchly and Eckert learned for the first time that von Neumann, according to Scott McCartney, "had met with the Pentagon legal department about the patent situation, and had filed an Army War Patent Form himself" on the basis of the "First Draft" doc.u.ment Goldstine had typed up in June 1945. The fact that hundreds of people had read the doc.u.ment const.i.tuted publication, as far as the army was concerned, and so the ideas in the doc.u.ment could not be patented. McCartney maintains that this argument on the part of the army was a surprise to von Neumann and Goldstine as well as to Mauchly and Eckert, but, given von Neumann"s connections and his habit of being "five blocks" ahead of the compet.i.tion, it seems unlikely that his lawyer would not have informed him of this possibility before the meeting. The meeting served to spur Mauchly and Eckert"s own patenting efforts, and they filed their paperwork at the end of June 1947. According to McCartney, "The application was broad and unfocused and it attempted to make more than one hundred claims covering the computing waterfront." Crucially for the future of computing, Eckert and Mauchly a.s.signed the patent rights they claimed not to themselves, personally, but to their company, in order to lure potential investors and contracts.

Mauchly"s job was to manage the company and to find financing and contracts. Eckert"s was to oversee the building of their first machine, now dubbed UNIVAC (for UNIVersal Automatic Computer). By December 1947, the company had thirty-six employees, including several engineers and other technicians who had followed Mauchly and Eckert (or had been lured by them) out of the Moore School. Another was Grace Murray Hopper, who had worked for Aiken at MIT and later developed COBOL, the first data processing language that worked like English. Company culture was energetic and exciting-Eckert was an inventive dynamo who showed up late every morning, sometimes six or seven days a week, and worked until late in the evening. But without Goldstine"s discipline, Eckert"s ideas were not focused on building his machine in a progressive and productive manner-he tinkered with every part and redid everyone"s designs. And he did not care for disagreement. McCartney characterizes the engineering side of the company as a "dictatorship," but it was a chaotic dictatorship, which turned out to be a bad form of organization, since the contracts Mauchly was procuring were fixed-price contracts, as if the products were ready, although they were only in development. Even though working on UNIVAC was exciting, cost overruns meant that contracts could not be fulfilled in a timely manner, and new projects had to be added in order to pay for old projects. Eventually, UNIVAC cost $900,000 to develop, though the contracts were worth only $270,000. Eckert and Mauchly were incapable of being frugal, and nothing in their experience at the Moore School had trained them to attempt such a thing. They were accustomed to both the stimulation and the chaos that large teams of inventors generated, but having always been administered, they did not themselves know how to administer. The number of employees crept upward, and at one point engineers were encouraged to purchase stock in the company for $5,000 just to keep the company afloat.

In the meantime, von Neumann took Goldstine and Arthur Burks to Princeton to work on a computer for the Inst.i.tute for Advanced Study (though Burks left within a few months for a teaching job at the University of Michigan). In the book Colossus by Jack Copeland, photograph 50 is a picture of John von Neumann, standing beside the Princeton IAS computer. The picture is undated, but the IAS computer began to operate in the summer of 1951 and was officially operational on June 10, 1952. Along the bottom of the wall of hardware runs a row of shiny metal cylinders, their ends pointing upward at about a forty-five-degree angle (fifteen are visible in the photo). These cylinders are Williams tubes, and they const.i.tuted the memory of the IAS computer.

At this point, von Neumann had been organizing his computer project for at least seven years. Back in the summer of 1946, when Atanasoff was told that the navy computer project was off, he was not told why, but part of the reason was that in late 1945, the very well connected John von Neumann had entertained letters of interest from the University of Chicago and MIT, with further feelers from Harvard and Columbia. Von Neumann was drawn to Princeton even though, as the letter from Norbert Wiener of MIT (soon to get in trouble with Dr. Jefferson) predicted, the problem that would plague the development of the IAS computer was that at "the Princest.i.tute [the Inst.i.tute for Advanced Studies] ... you are going to run into a situation where you will need a lab at your fingertips, and labs don"t grow in ivory towers." Von Neumann got something that he considered more important from the Inst.i.tute for Advance Study-$100,000 for development (equivalent to $1 million today), with another $200,000 readily available. Even $300,000 would not be enough, though, so von Neumann approached both the army and the navy. Something that von Neumann understood (and that, of course, Atanasoff had also understood) was the computing difficulties of solving nonlinear partial differential equations. But if Atanasoff, writing his dissertation on the dielectric constant of helium in 1930, was forced to grapple with the vast tedium of his equations, von Neumann, overseeing the mathematical side of the Manhattan Project, understood the difficulty even more sharply because he had a greater experience with what the military wanted to do with such equations. Though the equations he had worked out for the detonation of Fat Man and Little Boy were done to the best of the Manhattan Project"s mathematical ability, they did not prove as predictive as the army and air force had hoped they would. And von Neumann was also interested in the applicability of such equations to weather patterns and forecasting.

And so, in late 1945 and into 1946, von Neumann wooed both the army and the navy-to the navy, he promised a.n.a.lysis of explosions in water, weather prediction, and even weather control. According to Norman Macrae, von Neumann did not hesitate to threaten the navy with the idea of Josef Stalin using computer-driven weather control to launch a new ice age in North America (though there was no reason to believe that the Soviets were developing a computer and nothing of the sort has since come to light). The army and the navy both kicked in funds for von Neumann"s computer, and the navy ended Atanasoff"s computer project. To his credit, though, von Neumann understood that the army and the navy had to agree to the same terms in their contracts, so that the project would not be subject to cost cutting by one branch or the other, and he also insisted that the intellectual property that might come out of the project would neither be made top secret nor be patented, thereby ensuring that other projects could also emerge from the IAS project. He seems to have understood all along the implications of the fact that he would be building upon ENIAC, upon the "First Draft," and upon EDVAC, that he would be recruiting to Princeton at least Goldstine and Burks, and that he would make use of his connections with Manchester through Max Newman, and through him to F. C. Williams and Thomas Kilburn. It is quite possible that he understood the relationship between Atanasoff"s ideas and what he intended to do, but there is no evidence for it one way or another, other than the fact that he did have conversations with Atanasoff at the NOL.

At Princeton, von Neumann, Goldstine, and, to some extent, Arthur Burks wrote the papers that codified and described the ideas about computer memory that von Neumann had introduced in the "First Draft." According to Macrae, von Neumann described the ideas, Goldstine and Burks wrote them up, and von Neumann then rewrote them. The final draft was up to Goldstine, but it carried von Neumann"s name.

Von Neumann wanted Eckert as his engineer for the Princeton project. Eckert turned him down, according to McCartney, because he remained loyal to Mauchly and, according to Macrae, because he wanted to patent his inventions and profit from them. But Eckert and von Neumann also had a history of conflict, which might have played a part in Eckert"s decision. Von Neumann did not approach Atanasoff, although it"s hard to avoid the thought that his conversation with Atanasoff at the NOL const.i.tuted something of a job interview. Atanasoff found von Neumann congenial-but then, so did almost everyone else. At any rate, the team von Neumann set up did not include Atanasoff. Kirwan c.o.x maintains that Atanasoff was known at Iowa State for being abrupt and hard to get along with-he had a disconcerting habit of turning away in the middle of conversations: "People thought he was walking away in anger, but he was just finished with the conversation in his own mind. He was tough on people." It may be that von Neumann recognized that Atanasoff was not a team player and that in any project Atanasoff might be involved in, he would insist on calling the shots.

The memory system Eckert was developing was, in the eyes of John von Neumann, one of UNIVAC"s main drawbacks. This system, called a mercury delay line, owed something to Eckert"s radar experience. The UNIVAC mercury delay line required an array of horizontal cylinders filled with liquid mercury through which electrical impulses could travel rather slowly. The memory worked by recycling the electrical impulses through the mercury over and over, using quartz transducers.1 Mercury delay line memories had an advantage in that the acoustic conductivity of quartz and mercury were about the same, but they also had serious drawbacks-the architecture of each cylinder was very particular and they were easy to damage. The word "unwieldy" doesn"t even begin to describe a mercury delay line memory-for UNIVAC, the memory required its own room, in which stood seven memory units, each composed of eighteen columns of mercury. This room could store 15,120 bits of memory (equivalent to 1,890 bytes, or not quite 2 kilobytes, although bytes and bits of memory were not standardized at the time-in the UNIVAC I, a byte was 7 bits, not 8). Added to that was the weight and the toxicity of mercury, which in itself limited the general usefulness of the UNIVAC, as well as its potential commercial appeal. And the UNIVAC was a decimal machine, making it even more unwieldy.

When von Neumann, Goldstine, and Burks began on the IAS computer, von Neumann asked RCA (nearby in Philadelphia) to develop a tube that could be used for memory storage. They did, calling their product the Selectron, but the tubes took too long to develop-they were expensive and complicated-so by the end of 1948 von Neumann had decided to adopt Williams tubes.

Another issue von Neumann and his team addressed was that of translation. Just as Atanasoff had realized in 1939 that not every mathematician was comfortable with base-two numbers, and so the results put out by the ABC were automatically translated into decimal numbers, von Neumann realized that the more powerful and useful a computer might become, the more essential a translating mechanism for input and output would be. And von Neumann wanted his computer to do more than solve math problems-he also wanted it to be able to use language (like Colossus, which could decipher a code more easily than it could perform a large multiplication problem-and we will never know whether von Neumann"s friends on the Colossus project ever chatted with him about what they had done). Unable to get Eckert, von Neumann hired an engineer named Julian Bigelow to put together the IAS computer, thinking that the project would take ten people about three years.

But von Neumann could not work with Bigelow, who, he felt, tended to go down blind alleys, trying things without a good sense ahead of time of how those ideas would work. And Norbert Wiener turned out to be correct about the lack of receptivity at the IAS toward the computer project. It was housed in a boiler room and then an outbuilding, and even then there were complaints about it from the other scholars. Work that was farmed out went to corporations that didn"t know what was really wanted. Von Neumann himself was an ideas man, not a technology man (though when his wife declared that he could not handle a screwdriver, she added that he was good at fixing zippers). Adding to these difficulties, after January 1950, once Truman gave the go-ahead, von Neumann was hard at work on the hydrogen bomb, work that accelerated through 1950, when Edward Teller"s first ideas were proven wrong, and into 1951, when Teller and Stanislaw Ulam came up with an idea that worked. Through both these phases of H-bomb development, the IAS computer did produce necessary calculations, especially after James Pomerene was installed to replace Bigelow. One can only wonder how the construction of the computer would have gone if John Vincent Atanasoff had been allowed to bring his exceptional improvisational talents to it-but perhaps from their conversations, von Neumann understood that in addition to being difficult to work with, Atanasoff had an even greater claim to the computer concepts von Neumann wanted to utilize than Mauchly and Eckert did, and, having experienced what he considered to be Mauchly and Eckert"s greed, he did not want to risk that possibility again.

In 1948, a member of Mauchly and Eckert"s business team, George Eltgroth, a patent attorney, was approached by a racetrack owner about using computers to break the monopoly of the American Totalizer Company over bookmaking at American racetracks. Eltgroth saw his chance and went to American Totalizer itself. He found a willing partner in Henry Straus, vice president of the tote company-Straus oversaw the investment of $550,000 into UNIVAC-a $62,000 loan and $488,000 for 40 percent of the company stock. But Mauchly"s payroll continued to expand-by 1949, there were 134 employees-while the contracts kept contracting. At one time, Mauchly had orders for six UNIVACs, but he had received only $150,000 apiece for the machines, and UNIVAC was still not completed. And then, in November 1949, Henry Straus was killed in a plane crash, and American Totalizer asked for their investment back-now worth $432,000. Eckert and Mauchly then approached IBM. Thomas J. Watson, Sr., later said that he wasn"t impressed by Mauchly, but it also turned out that, according to IBM lawyers, ant.i.trust laws forbade IBM from acquiring UNIVAC.

In early 1950, Mauchly and Eckert"s company was denied security clearance and therefore banned from accepting top-secret military contracts-a significant portion of those available to private industry. The reasons for the denial of clearance were a mix of anti-Communist paranoia (a member of the engineering team had supported Henry Wallace; Mauchly himself had signed a pet.i.tion in 1946 supporting civilian control of nuclear energy) and general suspicion-army intelligence asked the FBI to investigate the drowning of Mary Mauchly, which it did, exonerating Mauchly. A few weeks after the denial of security clearance, Remington Rand bought the Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation. They paid off the debt to American Totalizer and gave Eckert and Mauchly $100,000 for the remaining 60 percent of the stock, which included the ENIAC patents. The two princ.i.p.als also got a guaranteed $18,000 per year salary and 5 percent of the yearly profits for eight years, should any profits accrue. Thirteen months later, UNIVAC was finally working.

The first UNIVAC, which had been a.s.sembled on the second floor of the Eckert-Mauchly building, an old knitting factory, weighed 29,000 pounds and covered 380 square feet of floor s.p.a.ce. It used 5,200 vacuum tubes (less than a third of the number in ENIAC) and consumed 125 kilowatts of electricity (as much as 1,250 100-watt lightbulbs, about 16 percent less than ENIAC). The mercury delay line memory was made up of large horizontal cylinders containing liquid mercury that circulated acoustic vibrations representing stored instructions and other data. The external memory, or ROM, was stored on either magnetic tape or punch cards.

Some difficulties with the manufacture of the first UNIVAC arose almost at once-the Eckert-Mauchly building was not air-conditioned and could get so hot in a Philadelphia summer that tar from the roof would melt onto the computer through the ceiling. In fact, no thought had been given to the computer"s environment-holes were cut in the walls for summer ventilation that then made the vast room impossible to heat in the winter. And, a serious drawback for a commercial venture, the machine could not be delivered-it was too complex and delicate to be quickly disa.s.sembled. At any rate, Mauchly (and Remington Rand) wanted to use the first one for demonstrations only in order to gain more contracts.

But eventually, forty-six UNIVAC I computers were manufactured, sold, and delivered to such companies as Metropolitan Life Insurance, Westinghouse, and U.S. Steel, as well as to government agencies: the Army Map Service (one of the original contracts), the Pentagon, and the Census Bureau (though this one stayed at company headquarters and was operated there). Although Mauchly had charged only $159,000 for the computer in the first contracts, the price eventually rose by almost a factor of 10. UNIVAC I gave way to UNIVAC II in 1958.

In 1951, like Mauchly and Eckert, Atanasoff decided to go into private enterprise, but unlike them, he first mastered the basic principles of accounting (which took him three days) and of business law (about a month). He wrote his own articles of incorporation and lured some of his fellow researchers away from the NOL. The plan was to offer testing services, especially to the military-the cold war meant that there were lots of military contracts, and they were lucrative. He set up his offices in Frederick, Maryland, which he chose after studying the weather patterns in the Washington, D.C., area and deciding that, should there be an atomic attack, Frederick would be outside of the radiation plume, and therefore somewhat safer than his first location of choice, Rockville. In Frederick, he had his corporate headquarters built and equipped with what he considered to be the best supplies for protecting and cleaning the building in the event of an attack-a neoprene-coated roof, sheets of plywood to protect the windows, and boxes of Tide detergent for spraying on the building.

With his usual confidence and frugality, Atanasoff used his own savings as capital for his business, along with investments of those who would be working with him. According to Tammara Burton, the company, which operated on military contracts, was always solvent and never had to borrow money. Atanasoff now focused on his company and deliberately ignored what was going on in the world of computers. The testing Atanasoff"s company performed ranged from determining how a projectile might approach and strike an airplane in flight to figuring out how best to drop leaflets on a populated area as a form of psychological warfare (the army gave him this contract during the Korean War). Though the company was successful, entrepreneurial life was taxing in some ways-Atanasoff later recalled, "I have a great deal of affection for the men who are a.s.sociated with me and we generally understood each other pretty well, but nevertheless they regarded me as a kind of a harsh director, always attempting to advance the work at all times of the day and night ... I found this discipline severe."

In February 1951 the first Ferranti-manufactured Mark I, the computer developed at the University of Manchester, was delivered to the new university computer lab. According to Andrew Hodges (and this is important for the development of the computer as we know it), "In many ways, [because of Turing"s lack of interest in the project], the Computing Laboratory remained as secret as Hut 8," restricting the public relations potential, and therefore sales, of the Manchester computer. EDVAC and UNIVAC dominated the news.

In March of the same year, Alan Turing was elected to the Royal Society, but then, in January 1952, Turing met a young man named Arnold Murray. Turing was now almost forty, Murray was nineteen. Turing cultivated the acquaintance, and Murray bragged about it to a friend. The unfortunate result was that the friend broke into Turing"s house outside of Manchester and stole some of Turing"s possessions. Murray managed to get some of the things back from the friend, but by this time, Turing had already reported the burglary. His report alerted the police, who, upon uncovering an illegal h.o.m.os.e.xual relationship between Turing and Murray, arrested Alan Turing under the draconian Labouchere Amendment to the Criminal Law Amendment Act 1885 (Section 11), which stated that "any male person who, in public or private, commits any act of gross indecency with another male person shall be guilty of a misdemeanour, and being convicted thereof shall be liable at the discretion of the court to be imprisoned for any term not exceeding two years, with or without hard labour," the same law that had been used to prosecute Oscar Wilde.

In his usual unashamed fashion, Turing detailed the nature of his relationship to Murray (he had never been ashamed of his h.o.m.os.e.xuality, nor had he ever shown caution in expressing himself on any subject). In early April 1952, Turing was convicted of "gross indecency" and given a choice between a year in prison and a year of drug therapy designed to inhibit his s.e.xual desires-a course of estrogen shots (chemical castration). Although such a conviction meant, in the cold war atmosphere of the 1950s, that Turing could no longer work for the British government. His friends felt that he was unrepentant about what had happened-under security surveillance (which he knew about), Turing went to Norway, where he had heard that there were venues for all-male dancing. The letters he wrote to his friends were often bemused and, apparently, lighthearted, though not uniformly so. In a 2009 article in the Daily Mail discussing what sort of posthumous honors Turing might receive for his intelligence work during World War II, Geoffrey Wansell points out that the estrogen "transformed his body. The man who had run a marathon in 2 hours and 46 minutes-when the world record was 2 hours and 25 minutes-was reduced to a shadow of his former self. "They"ve given me b.r.e.a.s.t.s," he was reported to have said to a friend, describing the shameful process as "horrible" and "humiliating." "

Through 1952 and 1953, Turing engaged in more travel and more work on his theories of brain as machine/machine as brain. And then, on June 8, 1954, Alan Turing was found by his housekeeper, dead of cyanide poisoning in his house in Manchester, a half-eaten apple by his bedside (he customarily ate an apple before going to bed). There was no suicide note.

Turing"s mother never believed that he had committed suicide-she thought that he had died accidentally, as a result of a careless chemistry experiment. Others pointed out that as a convicted h.o.m.os.e.xual who liked to travel abroad and make contact with young men, he was seen by the British security services as not only a risk, but a growing risk, since the cold war was escalating quickly. Turing was highly knowledgeable about Colossus and all sorts of other state secrets, and now he was a convicted but unrepentant h.o.m.os.e.xual who was a.s.sociated with King"s College, which, along with Trinity College, was considered to be a hotbed of Soviet spies (Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean, who had defected to the Soviet Union in 1951, had been at Trinity College in the thirties and were also h.o.m.os.e.xuals). Some people continue even in 2010 to feel that he was a.s.sa.s.sinated, with a "suicide" staged by British security. Or perhaps they had simply invited him to commit suicide. Friends remembered Turing wondering aloud about methods for committing suicide-they thought at the time that he was merely engaging in one of his frequent thought experiments. Others have suggested that, thanks to his gross indecency conviction and to his unorthodox ideas, Turing was at the end of his career and knew it. In any event, he died in obscurity, thirty years before either his role in World War II crypta.n.a.lysis or his role in the invention of the computer would emerge.

1. A computer engineer in England suggested using a delay line with the cylinders filled with gin.

Chapter Ten.

By the early 1950s, three computers had made their way into the marketplace.

In England, a second Ferranti Mark 1 was ordered for the Atomic Energy Research Establishment, near Oxford, to be delivered in 1952. But after the Labour government headed by Clement Atlee was thrown out in October 1951, the new Tory government, headed by Winston Churchill, canceled all government contracts worth more than a hundred thousand pounds, and so the second Ferranti machine was never completed. Work on the computer was halted, and it was later bought for very little by the University of Toronto. However, seven other Ferranti computers (of a slightly different design) were sold, one to Sh.e.l.l Labs in Amsterdam. But it was not only expense that killed the development of computers in England, it was also vigilant secrecy. According to Kirwan c.o.x, the Canadian filmmaker, because Churchill had found himself quoted in Mein Kampf about how England had won the First World War, he "became paranoid about information that had enabled the British victory getting out again." Presumably, the enemy to be wary of was now the Soviet Union.

There was much more money and much more self-promotion in the United States. In March 1951 UNIVAC became available, and in 1952 the IBM 701 was unveiled at the end of April. The 701 was an offshoot of von Neumann"s IAS computer. Like the IAS, it used Williams tubes for memory (72 in one version, 144 in another). It was intended for use as a scientific calculator (and had been known while in development as the "Defense Calculator"). The 701 was joined by the 702, the 650, and the 705. The 701 and the 650 were designed for business use; IBM seemed destined to consolidate a share of what was turning out to be an actual market, but then, in the November presidential election between Dwight D. Eisenhower and Adlai Stevenson, the UNIVAC scored a big public relations victory when it predicted the outcome for CBS based on early returns. The PR coup might have been designed by an advertising agency-at first the UNIVAC"s predictions looked so out of whack that network operators fiddled with them in order to avoid embarra.s.sment, but then the network had to admit even greater embarra.s.sment-the original unfiddled predictions turned out to be very close to the actual results of the election. When CBS revealed what had happened on the air, UNIVAC became the face of the computer in the 1950s public imagination, and the result for Remington Rand was more sales, this time lucrative ones, to companies rather than to the government.

IBM had two commercial advantages, though: one was the punch-card system that many offices already had in place, and the other was the business model, which focused upon leasing and service rather than outright sales. It looked as though IBM was to dominate the business market and foil von Neumann"s plan for the computer to be based upon common intellectual property rather than proprietary patents.

But von Neumann"s dissemination of the ideas behind ENIAC meant that there were people working on designing and building computers all over the United States-challenges to the original ENIAC patents by Control Data, Honeywell, Burroughs, General Electric, RCA, and National Cash Register began almost immediately, and they meant that the ENIAC patents (which made more than a hundred proprietary claims) were slow to be awarded to Remington Rand, who had obtained them when they bought out Mauchly and Eckert.

In October 1953, Pres Eckert published an article on computer memory in the Journal of the Inst.i.tute of Radio Engineers in which he knowledgeably described the structure and the function of the ABC"s memory system and also expressed admiration for its frugality: "There may have been similar systems prior to Atanasoff"s, but none was as inexpensive to construct." Eckert"s article served to motivate the patent department at IBM, which, like the smaller companies, had come to believe that Eckert and Mauchly"s ENIAC patents might be broken. Clifford Berry learned that IBM was looking for information about "capacitor drum storage devices," or, as Atanasoff had called his invention, "regenerative memory." Berry"s work on the ABC was known at Consolidated Engineering, his place of business in Pasadena, and what the IBM representative learned from a lawyer in the patent office at Berry"s company was the subject of an IBM in-house memorandum of September 30, 1953-Consolidated Engineering planned to visit Iowa State and look into Berry"s claims. IBM decided to collaborate on this investigation. The Consolidated Engineering patent attorney also informed IBM that "he had heard rumors that Burroughs, National Cash, and IBM were planning, as part of a team, to form a patent pool, particularly with a view of fighting the Eckert-Mauchly patents." Kirwan c.o.x believes that the sequence of events was slightly different-Berry saw Eckert"s article, read the patent, and told his employer that the patent was based on the prior art of the ABC. Consolidated Engineering was already doing business with IBM, and so contacted IBM about the apparent patent infringement. The younger Thomas J. Watson, much more interested in computers than his father had been, was eager to circ.u.mvent the ENIAC patents. In April 1954, a representative from IBM interviewed Clifford Berry in California. On June 14, when he visited Atanasoff in Frederick, Maryland, the IBM representative, a man named A. J. Etienne, even said, "If you will help us, we will break the Mauchly-Eckert computer patent; it was derived from you."

According to Burton, Atanasoff was floored by this declaration-he had believed Mauchly when he told him at the Naval Ordnance Lab eleven years earlier that the new computer he and Eckert were developing was different from the ABC and "better" than the ABC. But Etienne seemed to know what he was talking about. He said that the particular patent that IBM wanted to challenge was the patent for the memory system-that is, the rotating drum with the rows of capacitors that were regenerated by vacuum tubes. This patent had been finally issued to Remington Rand in the previous year, 1953; possibly IBM knew that Atanasoff had invented this memory system, so this was the patent that they chose to challenge. Etienne asked Atanasoff for all of the relevant paperwork concerning the ABC, but thirteen years, a war, a divorce, and several moves had intervened, and Atanasoff was unable to find what he needed immediately. On June 21, Etienne sent him a copy of Eckert and Mauchly"s patent and Atanasoff wrote back, promising to get him as much of the paperwork as he could. But he never heard from Etienne again, and as far as he knew, the patent challenge was dropped. When Atanasoff read through Eckert and Mauchly"s patent, he saw that it was based on his ideas, but he a.s.sumed the case was dropped because the IBM lawyers had decided that breaking the patent was not feasible.

It was not that IBM had decided that breaking the patent was not feasible; rather, they had decided to make a secret deal with Remington Rand. The deal was to be beneficial for both parties-UNIVAC mostly used an awkward and unfamiliar magnetic tape system for external storage of data; most offices in the market for a computer already had lots of data punched onto IBM cards, and the IBM 650 used these cards. It was not as powerful a computer as UNIVAC, but because of the punch-card storage system, it was a successful entry into the business computer market. But IBM was sued under ant.i.trust laws for using leasing agreements and proprietary punch-card systems to monopolize the office machine market. The solution seemed to be that IBM would sign a consent decree with Remington Rand. The two companies sued each other for patent access. In the meantime, in 1955, Sperry, originally a company specializing in aviation and navigation products (such as gyroscopes, but also the ball turret gun mounted underneath the B-17 during the war), bought Remington Rand.

About two years after Etienne"s contact with Atanasoff, IBM entered into a private agreement with Sperry Rand, agreeing to pay $10 million over eight years in exchange for access to the ENIAC patents. Once the agreement had been signed, IBM and Sperry aggressively pursued what they considered patent violations by other companies.

However, IBM and Sperry Rand were busy looking around for other computer ideas. One man whom Konrad Zuse had impressed with the Z4, Helmut Goeze, had married an American woman and moved to the United States. Goeze not only knew that the Z4 could calculate, he knew the amazing tale of its journey from Berlin to Austria at the end of the war. As Zuse writes, "Now in the United States, Goeze wanted to lend his support to this world-important something." Somehow, Goeze contacted Thomas J. Watson, Sr., who in turn contacted Hollerith Germany, an IBM subsidiary.1 Representatives from Hollerith Germany visited Zuse and the Z4, but they wanted neither the machine nor Zuse"s services-they wanted his intellectual property rights. Over the course of the next year, Zuse negotiated with the company, and as it happened he did make a nice sum of money, in part because the negotiations took so long, and in part because the sum negotiated was in reichsmarks-by the time he cashed the check, reichsmarks had become deutschemarks, which were worth twice as much as reichsmarks. But Hollerith Germany would not hire Zuse for any kind of research-it seems clear in retrospect that throughout the fifties, IBM"s main interest was in cornering the computer market. Zuse did get a research grant from Remington Rand, but it was for a technology that Zuse felt was already superseded-mechanical switching. Zuse thought that he got the grant simply because Remington Rand "still did not completely trust their own [ENIAC-based] electronics, so they wanted to have more than one egg in their basket, just in case."

John von Neumann was busy, too, but not on the computer. Once the cold war arms race was well under way, he devoted more and more of his time to advising the United States government, and he gained more and more influence. He may have decided that he had done what he could for computers and that, as Max Newman felt, they were now in the hands of the engineers. And then, in the summer of 1955, he suffered a spontaneous shoulder fracture. That August, he learned that he had a tumor on his left clavicle, probably a metastasis from undiagnosed pancreatic cancer. There was some suspicion that his illness was the result of radiation exposure during his time in A-bomb labs. He was not yet fifty-two. By November 1956 he was in a wheelchair, and by January 1957 he was in and out of the hospital with brain cancer (the Atomic Energy Commission posted a security guard by the door to his hospital room for fear that he would reveal atomic secrets when he was "screaming in horror"). But he continued to advise the government from his deathbed and died on February 8, not quite three years after Turing.

In early 1959, an IBM official sent an inquiry to Sperry, asking to see the copy of Clifford Berry"s master"s thesis, "Design of Electrical Data Recording and Reading Mechanisms," which Sperry had obtained in 1953 and in which Berry described the ABC"s regenerative memory. This alerted Sperry, and a Sperry vice president, R. H. Sorensen, began to poke around-he called Iowa State to inquire about the ABC. According to Kirwan c.o.x, Sperry also hired Howard Aiken to go to Iowa State and look into the matter-he would have, of course, discovered that the ABC had been dismantled. Sorensen took Atanasoff to lunch at the exclusive and elegant Cosmos Club in Washington, D.C. After the lunch, Sorensen sent an in-house memo that conceded that the patents Sperry had inherited from Mauchly and Eckert did overlap with technology already realized in the ABC, but as a result of his meeting with Atanasoff, he doubted that Atanasoff would pursue any legal action-Atanasoff had tried to interest Sorensen in another idea he had for a calculating machine that would have some characteristics of a desktop calculator and some characteristics of a punch-card electronic tabulator. Sorensen politely put him off. Atanasoff was not as gullible as Sorensen thought, however, because after the lunch, he obtained copies of the patents in question, and he saw that they did replicate work that he had done on the ABC. He then went back to his own ordnance business, but not without stowing his new information in a safe place.

Atanasoff"s Ordnance Engineering Corporation had prospered. In 1956, it was bought for a healthy sum by Aerojet General Corporation, a California company specializing in rocket propulsion technology. Atanasoff took half the proceeds in cash and half in stock-subsequently, the stock split so many times that Atanasoff became a wealthy man. For a few years, Atanasoff worked as vice president and head of the East Coast division, and then, in 1960, he was offered the chance to head the s.p.a.ce division, which he turned down. Corporate life did not suit him in several ways-later he said, "I did not want to spend the rest of my life selling and it looked as if the princ.i.p.al effort of the Vice-president of Aerojet was to sell." Now with plenty of money after a life of frugality, he decided to retire. He was fifty-eight. He immediately embarked upon several projects-he purchased two hundred acres in Maryland and began to design and build an innovative house of a more-than-modern design that incorporated just the sort of unorthodox ideas that a man like Atanasoff would want in his dream house-not only energy-efficient cooling and heating systems and a functional layout, but also tilt-up panel construction and an eight-hundred-pound front door that rotated on bra.s.s bearings. He continued to involve himself in the lives of his grandchildren, which could be, according to Burton, less than comfortable for them. She writes, "Retirement mellowed Atanasoff very little, and he remained intense and challenging to others. One reporter described him as "creative and cantankerous," while his daughter Joanne postulated that "conflict was his favorite pastime" ... He enjoyed testing people and was fond of drawing friends and family into intense discussions-or arguments-as a means by which to grade their mental acuity ... he kept tabs on his grandchildren"s schoolwork and carved out time during visits to test us on pertinent material."

By 1960, Turing and von Neumann were dead, Arthur Burks was teaching philosophy at the University of Michigan, Max Newman had returned to topology, and Mauchly and Eckert had failed at owning and running their own computer business (though Mauchly had run the UNIVAC division at Sperry until 1959, then started his own consulting firm). Mauchly had received an honorary doctorate from the University of Pennsylvania, the Scott Medal from the Franklin Inst.i.tute, and other Philadelphia-based awards. Eckert was still with Sperry Rand (he stayed with Sperry, and then Unisys, until 1989). Neither Mauchly nor Eckert had profited directly from the ENIAC patent, but they did get credit (and they did seek that credit) for inventing the computer. Eckert, in particular, was vocal about the inaccuracy of the phrase "von Neumann architecture"-he thought it should be called "Eckert architecture." But the vagaries of patent law and the delay in awarding the Eckert and Mauchly patents seemed to be working for Sperry. If the patent had been awarded in 1947, it would have run out by 1964, before computers became big business. However, in 1960, the patent was still being challenged. It would not be finally awarded until 1964. At that point, it looked as though it would run into the eighties.

Zuse finally got to visit the United States and see what computers had been and were being built there, when he and his partner, Harro Stucken, accompanied their mechanical punch calculator test model to Sperry Rand headquarters in Norwalk, Connecticut. Although Zuse understood that the future of computers was electronic, he had contrived a method of doing mathematical operations on punch cards that allowed as many as ten cards to operate simultaneously. It was a mechanical calculator, but it was fast and cleverly conceived, and even though it was never put into ma.s.s production, it provided Zuse with funding for his company. Among those they got to visit were General Leslie Groves, who had run the Manhattan Project, and Howard Aiken, who was still advocating using decimal numbers for computers. Zuse writes, "At Harvard they were still completely convinced that the computer was an American invention." Some years later, Aiken wrote to Zuse, acknowledging the foresight of his earlier ideas. They were also taken to see the Whirlwind at MIT and were most impressed by its size.2 But Zuse"s business connections were Swiss more than American, and eventually the Z4, after years in a barn in the Austrian Alps, and thanks to the man in the elegant automobile, it was sent to Zurich, "the sixth transport we put it through." When the day came to demonstrate it, the Z4 started sparking and then went dead during an afternoon test run. Zuse and his partners did not panic, though-they discovered that the problem had to do with a newly installed transformer and fixed it: "We had exactly a half an hour to correct the error and replace the burned out lines. We did it, aired out the faint burning smell, and at four o"clock our ill.u.s.trious guests witnessed a perfect demonstration." Eventually, Zuse came to have his "fondest memories" of his years in Zurich. He admired his colleagues, and his computer continued to operate so reliably that it could be left on, unattended, overnight. He writes, "Many a night, I walked through the lonely streets of Zurich, on my way to check on the Z4. It was a strange feeling, entering the deserted ETH3 and hearing, already by the time I reached the first floor, that, on the top floor, the Z4 was still running perfectly. In those days you could tell from the rhythm of the punched tape reader."

In 1962, Richard Kohler Richards, who had a doctorate in electrical engineering, had worked at IBM, and had written several books on computers including Arithmetic Operations in Digital Computers and Digital Computer Components and Circuits, decided to return to Ames, where he had been an undergraduate at Iowa State, and write a book about the history of the computer. His neighbor turned out to be a man named Harry Burrell, who remembered writing a press release about the Atanasoff-Berry Computer around the time that the Des Moines Tribune ran a brief article, with a picture, about the machine (January 15, 1941). The article stated, "An electrical computing machine said here to operate more like the human brain than any other such machine known to exist is being built by Dr. John V. Atanasoff, Iowa State College Physics Professor. The machine contains more than 300 vacuum tubes and will be used to compute complicated algebraic equations. Dr. Atanasoff said it will occupy about as much s.p.a.ce as a large office desk. The instrument will be entirely electrical and will be used in research experiments." But there was no record of or paperwork concerning the machine in either the library or the engineering publications office. It was then that Richards visited Sam Legvold, who had returned to the physics department at Iowa State after the war and had worked with Atanasoff on his defense department project in the bas.e.m.e.nt of the physics building, right next to the ABC, and later with him at the NOL.

Legvold remembered the ABC quite well, and not only that, he had a drum from the computer that he had salvaged from the 1948 wreckage. He also remembered talking with Berry about the computer, though not with Atanasoff-with Atanasoff, he had only discussed the defense project they were working on. Legvold was not the only physics professor who remembered the ABC, but no one remembered how it worked (if they had ever known) or the principles behind it. In February 1963, Richards wrote to Atanasoff to inquire about the machine, but Atanasoff was too busy with his retirement projects to give him much help. Once again he was moving house-this time building the house-and once again, perhaps, the paperwork didn"t seem worth finding. Atanasoff always invested himself fully in his project of the minute, and in addition, none of his contacts with IBM or Sperry about the ABC had ever come to anything. He suggested that Richards contact Clifford Berry, who was younger and might remember the ABC in more detail.

In March, Richards wrote to Berry. Berry was now in his early forties, still married to Atanasoff"s former secretary, and gainfully employed in the research and development department at Consolidated Engineering Corporation (later to become a part of Bell and Howell and then DuPont). Consolidated Engineering specialized in developing ma.s.s spectrometers. In 1945, Berry had invented his own small computer for the purpose of sorting through the large amount of data produced by the ma.s.s spectrometer. Berry had invented many other things-eventually, he owned almost thirty patents in addition to the patent for his small computer. Richards also wrote to the UNIVAC division at Sperry, looking for John Mauchly"s address.

Berry replied ten days later. He remembered the ABC perfectly well. He directed Richards to his master"s thesis in the Iowa State library and also told him about the report for the Iowa State College Research Corporation and the patent applications that had been written but never filed. He added, "An interesting sidelight is that in 1940 or 1941 we had a visit from Dr. John Mauchly who spent a week learning all of the details of our computer and the philosophy of its design. He was the only person outside of the Research Corporation and the patent counsel who was given this opportunity, and he may still have notes of what he learned from us." Berry then went on to give a concise description of the ABC. He wrote: I am not sure what Dr. Atanasoff told you about the machine so I will describe it briefly. The machine was designed specifically to solve sets of linear simultaneous algebraic equations up to 30 30. All internal operations were carried on in binary arithmetic; the size of the numbers handled was up to 50 binary places (about 15 decimal places). Initial input of data was by means of standard IBM cards, with five 15-place numbers per card; the machine translated the numbers to binary numbers. The machine"s "memory" consisted of two rotating drums filled with small capacitors. The polarity of the charge on a given capacitor represented the binary digit standing in that position. A "clock" frequency of 60 cycles per second was used, the mechanical parts of the machine being driven with a synchronous motor. Storage of intermediate results was by means of a special binary card punch, with which 30 binary numbers, each 50 digits long, could be punched on one card. The mathematical method employed to solve sets of equations was that of systematic elimination of coefficients through linear combinations of pairs of equations.

He included six pictures as well as copies of the news stories about the ABC. For the next few months, Richards and Berry conducted a detailed correspondence about the ABC. Berry, still in the computer business, was amazed to discover that the record of the ABC at Iowa State was so thin, and also that Atanasoff himself had not kept up with what was going on in computers sufficiently to maintain the record of his own contributions. The correspondence supplied Richards with enough detailed information to establish apparent links between the ABC and ENIAC.

Mauchly did not respond to Richards"s first letter and then did not return his calls. But Richards was persistent. When he finally reached Mauchly in the late summer, Mauchly was not happy to hear from him. He derided the ABC, but he did admit to staying in Ames for several days, looking at the computer, and discussing it with Atanasoff. Richards later wrote in h

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