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The Iowa Stater
Dec. 15, 1995

From ABC to CD-ROMs

To appreciate the cleverness and genius that went into the original Atanasoff-Berry Computer (ABC), try building one yourself. It's not easy, as the team of ISU engineers and retired faculty will attest. While a lack of documentation on the original ABC forced the team to painstakingly retrace the design and engineering steps Atanasoff and Berry took nearly 60 years ago, the path has revealed a timelessness in their work.

Built in the period of 1939-42, and clumsy and cumbersome by today's standards, the ABC did employ for the first time many of the basic computing principles used today. Ideas like a binary system of arithmetic, separating memory from computing functions, regenerative memory, electronic amplifiers (vacuum tubes then, transistors now) as on-off switches, parallel processing, circuits for logical addition and subtraction, modular design construction of the machine, and clocked control of electronic operations were first demonstrated in the ABC.

"Except for color monitors, a mouse and greater speed in computing, he figured out how to do all of [the basics] way back then," said Gary Sleege, a team member on the ABC replica project.

"The architecture is ingenious," added another team member, John Gustafson. "There were so many unprecedented innovations in that cabinet that one hardly knows where to start listing them for importance."

And Atanasoff's vision resonates today.

"He visualized a society in which almost everything was done in binary by machines," Gustafson said. "He thought that all communications and other things would be done in binary. This is just now happening. Everything -- our telephones, our TVs, our CD-ROMs -- are just now going digital."

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