by GARY WOLF
Who invented the computer? For anyone who has made a pilgrimage to the University of Pennsylvania and seen the shrine to the ENIAC, the answer may seem obvious: John Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert Jr., who led Penn’s engineering team in the 1940s. As it says on the plaque, the giant machine made of 17,468 vacuum tubes was the “first electronic large-scale, general-purpose digital computer.” But notice all the qualifying adjectives. Does this mean there was a smaller digital computer that actually came first?
Yes, it does. And that computer was invented by John Vincent Atanasoff, who, with his partner Clifford Berry, started assembling the machine in the basement of the physics building at Iowa State University in the late 1930s. (It was finished in 1942.) Atanasoff, a physicist by training, was on the engineering faculty. Berry was a graduate student. Their computer, which was the size of a large desk, could do laborious mathematical calculations electronically using vacuum tubes to perform its logical operations. Now called the ABC (for Atanasoff-Berry computer), it was little known at the time. But it was admired by a small circle of brilliant inventors who were working on the problem of massive calculation, including John von Neumann at Princeton and the engineers working on the ENIAC in Philadelphia.
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