Just one more technology post for now, folks, then I promise I'll change subjects. Next up will be eminent domain, and it's more good news.
The older I grow the more interested I become in history, whether it's my own family's or that of anything else I'm interested in.
Paul caught another good story today: a previously-lost interview with J. Presper Eckert, the co-inventor of ENIAC, the world's first fully electronic computer.
There are two epochs in computer history: Before ENIAC and After ENIAC. The first practical, all-electronic computer was unveiled on Feb. 14, 1946, at the University of Pennsylvania's Moore School of Electronics. While there are controversies about who invented what, there is universal agreement that the ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator And Computer) was the watershed project that showed electronic computing was possible. It was a masterpiece of electrical engineering, with unprecedented reliability and speed. The two men most responsible for its success were J. Presper Eckert and John W. Mauchly.
How did calculating machines work before ENIAC?
Well, a person with a paper and pencil can add two 10-digit numbers in about 10 seconds. With a hand calculator the time is down to 4 seconds. The Harvard Mark 1 was the last of the electromechanical computers -- it could add two 10-digit numbers in 0.3 seconds, about 30 times faster than paper and pencil.
So it's a myth that ENIAC could only add, subtract, multiply and divide.
No, that's a calculator. ENIAC could do three-dimensional, second-order differential equations. We were calculating trajectory tables for the war effort. In those days. The trajectory tables were calculated by hundreds of people operating desk calculators -- people who were called computers. So the machine that does that work was called a computer.
So what did they give you? Did they say, "Here's a room, here are some tools, here are some guys -- go make it?"
Uh-huh. Pretty much.
Sounds like my kind of project.
You said the largest tube gadget in 1943 was the Nova Chord electronic organ. What did ENIAC use?
ENIAC had 18,000 vacuum tubes. The tubes were off the shelf; we got whatever the distributor could supply in lots of a thousand. We used 10 tube types, but could have done it with four tube types; we just couldn't get enough of them. We decided that our tube filaments would last a lot longer if we kept them below their proper voltage. Not too high or too low.
That was because the tubes didn't have to perform linear amplification as they did in almost all other applications, just switching. And the designers could invent their own logic signal levels--ENIAC didn't have to interface with any other devices, as there were no other devices yet.
A lot of the circuits were off the shelf, but I invented a lot of the circuits as well. Registers were a new idea. So were integrator circuits.
There's a story that some guy was running around with a box of tubes and had to change one every few minutes.
Another myth. We had a tube fail about every two days and we could locate the problem within 15 minutes. We invented a scheme to build the computer on removable chassis -- plug-in components -- so when tubes failed we could swap them out in seconds. We carried out a very radical idea in a very conservative fashion.
How old were you?
We signed the contract on my 24th birthday: May 9, 1943.
What was the first thing you did with ENIAC?
It was designed to calculate trajectory tables, but it came too late to really help with the war effort. The first real use was Edward Teller using ENIAC to do calculations for the hydrogen bomb.
What's the zaniest thing you did while developing ENIAC?
The mouse cage was pretty funny. We knew mice would eat the insulation off the wires, so we got samples of all the wires that were available and put them in a cage with a bunch of mice to see which insulation they did not like. We only used wire that passed the mouse test.
An example of good, old-fashioned common-sense in solving a problem, something that's fast disappearing nowadays. Today a government agency would spec the wire to be mouse-proof and put it out for bids, raising the cost ten times over what the wire should have cost.
You have dozens of patents for your inventions. What motivates you?
I am happiest when I am working on the edge of something -- where there are not many people who have done it. When nobody has done it, it is pretty tough. That gets me excited.
Again, my kind of project.
When you were working on ENIAC, did you have any inkling these things would be laptop-size and everyone would own one?
Mauchley thought the world would need maybe six computers. No one had any idea the transistor and chip technologies would come along so quickly. It is shocking to have your life work reduced to a tenth of a square inch of silicon.
A lot of people have claimed they invented the first computer. What about John Atanasoff?
In the course of a patent fight, the other side brought up Atanasoff and tried to show that he built an electronic computer ahead of us. It's true he had a lab bench tabletop kind of thing and John [Mauchley] went out to look at it and wrote a memo, but we never used any of it. His thing didn't really work. He didn't have a whole system. That's a big thing with an invention: You have to have a whole system that works.
Not any more, unfortunately. Now you can patent an "invention" that exists nowhere but your imagination, whether or not the technology is even plausible, much less already built and working.
John and I not only built ENIAC. It worked. And it worked for a decade doing what it was designed to do. We went on to build BINAC and UNIVAC and hundreds of other computers. And the company we started is still in operation after many name changes as Unisys, and I am still working for that company. Atanasoff may have won a point in court, but he went back to teaching and we went on to build the first real electronic programmable computers, the first commercial computers. We made a lot of computers, and we still are.
And John Von Neumann?
He came and looked at our stuff and went back to Princeton and wrote a long document about the principles. He gets a lot of credit but the inventions were ours. Someday I'll write a book on who really invented the computer. It wasn't Atanasoff or Von Neumann. We did it.
Presper died in 1995. He never did write that book.
UPDATE: In case you're interested in this aspect of the above story, here are two sites that claim that Atanasoff was indeed the true inventor of the digital computer in 1941, and that Mauchly and Eckert "stole," or at least made unattributed use of, Atanasoff's ideas to build ENIAC. In fact, a Federal judge (Earl R. Larson) in Minneapolis ruled in 1973 that that was indeed just what happened, and he voided ENIAC's patent. Eckert's above interview implies that Atanasoff was unsuccessful in arguing that he was the true inventor, which is not the case, although Eckert doubtless believed it.
The answer to who invented the computer relies, in part, on exactly how one defines a "computer," not to mention the word "invented." Atanasoff's 1941 machine seems not to have been programmable, as was ENIAC, although not as programmable as we expect modern computers to be. It may indeed be possible that, while Atanasoff may have first conceived of how some aspects of an electronic digital computer might be made, and did indeed build something like that, he never actually succeeded in building anything remotely like ENIAC.
