It Began with Babbage (23 page)

Last, the IBM plugboard concept was used by the ENIAC designers to implement their problem setup procedure—their method of programming. When a problem had been transformed into a form suitable for the ENIAC, the units would be interconnected
and their switches set to enable the execution of the desired task. The ENIAC problem setup procedure was derived from, and an extension of, the IBM plugboard procedure.
⁶⁹

The ENIAC, then, was spun out of a web of past inventions. This itself is not especially unusual; phylogeny conditions ontogeny—and this, incidentally, is true as much in the realms of science, art, poetry, and fiction as in technological invention and design.

But the web in which the ENIAC was spun was tangled for other reasons, which had to do with the following kinds of questions about
inventionhood
. Who invented the first electronic computer? And who invented the ENIAC? These kinds of questions are of great interest to historians of science and technology, and to those who study creativity. In the case of the ENIAC, they were also of legal interest—hence the tangled web.

The legal aspect stemmed from a long-drawn-out and celebrated court trial over the ENIAC patent. The issue before the court was the validity of a patent, applied for in 1947 and granted in 1964, to Presper Eckert and John Mauchly for their “invention” of the ENIAC. In 1967, a lawsuit was filed by Honeywell Corporation against Sperry Rand concerning the ENIAC patent. Sperry Rand entered the picture in the often-tortuous ways of corporate mergers and acquisitions. In 1948, Mauchly and Eckert formed the Eckert Mauchly Computer Corporation.
⁷⁰
This company was acquired by Remington Rand in 1950, which itself merged with Sperry Gyroscope to form Sperry Rand in 1955.
⁷¹
Many of the patent rights on the ENIAC awarded to Eckert and Mauchly were acquired by Sperry Rand. Honeywell's suit challenged the very validity of the ENIAC patent. To add to the complications over inventionhood, as part of the same lawsuit, some other leading participants in the ENIAC project, including Arthur Burks, also filed claims as co-inventors of the ENIAC, along with Eckert and Mauchly.
⁷²

The ruling by Judge Earl Larson had many components to it, but the ones of immediate interest to our story were the following points. First, the judge stated that Eckert and Mauchly were the sole co-inventors of the ENIAC and that Burks and others had no claims as co-inventors.
⁷³
Second, the judge also found that Eckert and Mauchly did not
themselves
invent “automatic electronic computing,” but rather derived their ideas from “one Dr. John Vincent Atanasoff.”
⁷⁴
This ruling rendered the ENIAC patent invalid.

Third, Larson also ruled that the ENIAC patent was invalid because of the amount of time that had lapsed between the publication of its main features and the filing of the patent. The latter was done on June 26, 1946. However, in 1945, a document titled “First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC” was written by John von Neumann (whom we have encountered briefly [see
Chapter 4
, Section III, and this chapter, Section II], but will soon meet at length). This report, as we will see, will initiate another chapter of our story, and make the whole matter of inventionhood in the realm of computing even
murkier. What mattered to Larson, however, is that on June 30, 1945, Herman Goldstine disseminated this report on a machine that was intended to be the ENIAC's successor. The report was legally deemed a publication and an “enabling disclosure” of the ENIAC almost a year before the ENIAC patent application was filed, which also rendered the patent invalid.

So, legally, the ENIAC patent (and Eckerd and Mauchly's claim to that patent) was rendered invalid. Legally, Eckert and Mauchly had “derived” its principles from Atanasoff's work. Yet, outside the law court, the question of who
really
invented the automatic electronic computer poses much difficulty. We now know, for instance, that the ABC and the ENIAC became operational after the Colossus. So if we allow that becoming operational is a reasonable criterion of inventionhood, the first automatic electronic computer was neither the ABC nor the ENIAC.

Then there is the fact that (like the Colossus), the ABC was designed as a special-purpose computer, to solve linear algebraic equations. Atanasoff recognized that it could also be applied to the solution of differential equations using numerical integration, but this possibility was never tested; it remained in the realm of possibility. The ENIAC was also special purpose, but much less so than the ABC. Even though it was envisioned as an electronic differential analyzer, thus intended to do the kinds of computations required to produce ballistic firing tables, its computational capabilities were such that its first use was computations needed for the hydrogen bomb project, which began in Los Alamos during the early 1940s.

Arthur Burks, one of its lead engineers and, later, one of its historians, had no doubts about the generality of the ENIAC. To him it was “the first electronic, digital, general-purpose scientific computer.”
⁷⁵
Writing in 1981, Burks defined a general-purpose computer as a digital computer that manifests two features. First, it affords arithmetic and memory capabilities that enable numbers to be entered automatically through an input unit and stored in an alterable memory, arithmetic operations to be performed on numbers, and the outcome transmitted to the outside world through an output device. Second, it provides a two-level programming facility. At the lower level are facilities for the execution of common sequences of arithmetic, input and output operations; at the higher level there is a capacity to combine these sequences into larger units—entire programs. Given these two features, according to Burks, one has a general-purpose computer that can solve a variety of problems—differential equations and number theoretical as well as data processing—commonly encountered in science, engineering, and accounting.
⁷⁶
The ENIAC, meeting these criteria, according to Arthur and Alice Burks, was a general-purpose device.

Computer scientist and historian of computing Brian Randell would have none of it. He charged that the Burks's definition was “rather vague.” For instance, a machine that did not have a multiplier unit (which the ENIAC did) but could perform multiplication by repeated addition, met their definition. But,
should
such a computer count as general purpose?
⁷⁷
At the programming level, Randell suggested that any computer claiming to
be general purpose must have the “crucial” facility to select among items held in its read/write memory based on previously computed results—in present-entered language, a branching capability. The ENIAC did not meet this condition.
⁷⁸

The problem is that both Burks and Randell used somewhat arbitrary criteria to define a general-purpose computer. Furthermore, both, writing in 1981, suffered from the pitfalls of present-centered (whiggish) history (see Prologue, Section VII). Their judgment of what was a general-purpose computer was colored by their perspectives circa 1981; they both imposed their latter-day perceptions on earlier situations.

It is interesting to compare these opinions voiced a quarter century after the near completion of the ENIAC with a contemporary account by Herman and Adele Goldstine. Writing in 1946, they described the ENIAC as a general-purpose electronic computer that, although developed primarily for the purpose of calculating firing tables, could, in fact, produce solutions to a variety of numeric problems.
⁷⁹

A slightly later commentator, also (as we will see) a major participant in this story, would write about the ENIAC that its tiny memory along with its manual programming feature severely limited its use for many problems.
⁸⁰

Clearly, even among the protagonists of this early part of our story, the notion of a general-purpose computer had no well-defined or well-accepted features. As I have noted before, the ENIAC can best be described as a computer that had sufficient generality across a range of mathematical (or numeric) problems (see
Chapter 6
, Section III, and this chapter, Section I).

Last, we pause on the judgment rendered by Larson in the court case that the ENIAC was “derived” from the ABC and so cannot count as the “first automatic electronic computer.” We must not forget that the ABC was never a fully, correctly operating machine. On the contrary, it died a quiet death when Atanasoff and Berry both joined war projects. A machine's claim to priority (not the ideas underpinning the machine) must lie not just in the design, but also in its implementation. It is the operational machine that becomes a functioning artifact, not its underlying principles or its partial operationalism.

This never happened with the ABC. The ENIAC, on the other hand, was actually operational even before its formal dedication in February 1946. Its first computation was on a problem that pertained to the fledgling hydrogen bomb project in Los Alamos, and this computation was performed in December 1945.
⁸¹
The machine was running “satisfactorily” before its dedication.
⁸²
In November 1946, it was transferred from the Moore School to the Aberdeen Proving Ground, although it was not started up until February 1947. Thereafter, it operated continuously “until 11.45 pm on 2 October 1955.”
⁸³
The contrast between the fate of the ABC and that of the ENIAC was stark. In speaking of the first
operational
electronic computer, there was what logicians might call a category mistake in comparing the one with the other.

  
1
. B. Randell. (1980). The Colossus. In N. Metropolis, J. Howlett, & G.- C. Rota. (Eds.),
A history of computing in the twentieth century
(pp. 47–92). New York: Academic Press (see especially p. 74).

  
2
. A. W. Burks. (1980). From ENIAC to the stored program computer: Two revolutions in computers. In Metropolis, Howlett, & Rota (pp. 311–344).

  
3
. A. W. Burks & A. R. Burks. (1981). The ENIAC: First general-purpose electronic computer.
Annals of the History of Computing, 3
, 310–399 (see especially p. 311).

  
4
. H. H. Goldstine. (1972).
The computer from Pascal to von Neumann
(p. 156). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

  
5
. R. Moreau. (1984).
The computer comes of age
(p. 33). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

  
6
. Randell, op cit., pp. 74–75.

  
7
. Goldstine, op cit., p. 153.

  
8
. Burks & Burks, op cit., p. 337.

  
9
. Ibid., p. 311.

10
. A. W. Burks. (1947). Electronic Computing Circuits for the ENIAC.
Proceedings of the Institute of Radio Engineers, 35
, 756–767.

11
. Ibid.

12
. Ibid., p. 767.

13
.
Ontogeny
is “the life history of an individual, both embryonic and postnatal.” S. J. Gould. (1977).
Ontogeny and phylogeny
(p. 483). Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.

14
. Goldstine, op cit., p. 128.

15
. Ibid., pp. 131–133.

16
. Burks & Burks, op cit., p. 311.

17
. W. Thomson. (1878). Harmonic analyzer.
Proceedings of the Royal Society of London, 27
, 371–373.

18
. G. P. Zachary. (1977).
Endless frontier: Vannevar Bush, engineer of the American century
(p. 49). New York: Free Press.

19
. V. Bush. (1931). The differential analyzer, a new machine for solving differential equations.
Journal of the Franklin Institute, 212
, 447–488.

20
. Burks & Burks, op cit., p. 314.

21
. Zachary, op cit., p. 51.

22
. Ibid.

23
. Burks & Burks, op cit., p. 314.

24
. Zachary, op cit., p. 73.

25
. Goldstine, op cit., p. 130.

26
. Ibid., p. 133.

27
. Burks, 1980, op cit., p. 314.

28
. Ibid.

29
. Goldstine, op cit., p. 149.

30
. Burks, 1980, op cit., p. 314.

31
. J. V. Atanasoff. (1940).
Computing machine for the solution of large systems of linear algebraic equations
. Unpublished memorandum. Printed in B. Randell. (Ed.). (1975).
The origins of digital computers
(2nd ed., pp. 305–325). New York: Springer-Verlag (see especially p. 305).

32
. Ibid., p. 306.

33
. Ibid.

34
. J. V. Atanasoff. (1984). Advent of electronic digital computing.
Annals of the History of Computing, 6
, 229–282.

35
. Atanasoff, 1940, op cit., pp. 307–308.

36
. Ibid., p. 309.

37
. Atanasoff, 1984, op cit., p. 242; Burks & Burks, op cit., p. 317.

38
. Burks & Burks, op cit., p. 329.

39
. Ibid.

40
. Ibid., p. 330.

41
. Atanasoff, 1984, op cit., p. 255.

42
. C. R. Mollenhoff. (1988).
Atanasoff: Forgotten father of the computer
(p. 255). Ames, IA: Iowa State University Press.

43
. Atanasoff, 1984, op cit., pp. 254–255; Mollenhoff, op cit., pp. 55–58.

44
. Mollenhoff, op cit., p. 57.

45
. Quoted by Burks & Burks, op cit., p. 332.

46
. Ibid.

47
. J. V. Mauchly. (1942).
The use of high speed vacuum tube devices for calculating
. Unpublished memorandum. Printed in Randell (pp. 329–332), 1975, op cit.

48
. Goldstine, op cit., pp. 155–156.