The Iowa Stater, Sept. 1997

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The Iowa Stater
Sept. 1997

ABC to D.C.

Years of painstaking research and detective work will pay off next month when computer technology takes a giant step - backwards to its roots.

Iowa State officials will unveil an authentic working replica of the Atanasoff-Berry Computer at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., on Oct. 8.

The replica then will go on tour, with stops tentatively scheduled at:

Alumni also will have a chance to see the replica during Homecoming activities on Oct. 25.

The reconstruction is a tribute to computing pioneers John Atanasoff and Clifford Berry, who designed and built the ABC, the world's first electronic digital computer, at Iowa State from 1939 to 1942.

Iowa State and Ames Lab researchers, faculty members and students have toiled for four years to build a 1930s computer in the 1990s. It is, perhaps, one of the greatest retro-research projects ever undertaken.

Because the original ABC had been discarded, team members needed not only engineering and computing skills, but a considerable talent for scavenging. Parts didn't come easily and they didn't come with detailed diagrams.

"It's sort of like Sherlock Holmes detective work - a piece of information here, a piece of information there, add a picture and come to conclusions as to what a component did," said team member Gary Sleege, Ames Lab engineer.

Team members found themselves staring at several grainy black and white photographs and calling on the fading memories of people who worked on the original project or were close to it. Among those who provided help in ferreting out details were Robert Mather, a retired physicist who in the 1930s wired the original; and Jean Berry, Clifford's wife and Atanasoff's secretary, who helped the ISU team figure out what paper was needed for the ABC's read and write system.

The team also scavenged for authentic parts, like vacuum tubes, cotton-rubber insulated wire, IBM punches, gears and transformers.

"We were constrained by the fact that we couldn't use science and technology to short-cut a few things because it wouldn't be authentic," said John Gustafson, an Ames Lab computational scientist, who played a key role in building the replica. "The infrastructure from the 1930s just isn't there anymore."

"The architecture (of the ABC) is ingenious," Gustafson added. "There were so many unprecedented innovations in that cabinet that one hardly knows where to start listing them for importance."

The ABC was the first computing device to use a binary system of arithmetic, separate memory and computing functions, regenerative memory, electronic amplifiers (vacuum tubes then, transistors today) as on-off switches, circuits for logical addition and subtraction, clocked control of electronic operations, modular design construction and parallel processing. These computing staples are the cornerstone of modern computing.

In the mid 1930s, Atanasoff, a mathematics and physics professor at Iowa State College, knew there had to be a more efficient way to solve simultaneous equations than using a mechanical calculator. In 1934, he began exploring some of the ideas he later would use in his computing device. He enlisted the help of his graduate student, Berry, and in the basement of the Physics Building, they built the world's first computer.

Atanasoff and Berry's landmark machine was lost in the urgency of World War II. Ensuing computing machines - bigger, faster and more versatile than ABC - staked claim to computing patents. It wasn't until 1973 that a federal judge, ruling in a patent infringement lawsuit (Honeywell Inc. vs. Sperry Rand Corp. et. al.) held that Atanasoff's research was the root of most of the ideas behind modern computers.

"Atanasoff's breakthrough was the inspiration for the ENIAC and future computing devices," Gustafson said. "Atanasoff did the same thing for computing that the Wright brothers did for aviation. While he didn't start the commercial computer industry, he was the trigger that made it happen.

Skip Derra, News Service

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