ISU Media Message Episode #15

it is good evening and welcome to this the last in our current semester series of ISU media message I'm Bob Linda my associate director of the media Resources Center and back with me for a second chapter is Steve Knutson the founder of the film production unit Iowa State and I'm pleased to say my mentor in filmmaking a number of years ago been watching your work very closely as you might guess yes I thought you would this is what a mentor does you see Steve we we had your film about the horses last week but tonight it's John Vincent at Nassau the inventor of the electronic digital computer we have to say it carefully that way that's right and at in 1970s he had been identified by a circuit court federal court in Minneapolis as the is the inventor but very few people even at Iowa State realized that this was the case so Karl Hamilton Denton vice-president for Iowa State University asked me to look into this well I didn't have a lot of locomotives and other things that make grants but it was intriguing and so I suggested that yes we should try to get funding to see what we could do it but getting the funding was another story took a while I guess it took a strung-out we finally used what we have gotten early and went out and shot because we didn't want to lose it in case something happened to JB himself he was living in Maryland and retirement at the time yes at Frederick Maryland right alongside interstate 74 and we were back to shoot and then if they had to lay around again until we got the rest of the funny to it to finish the film so the film was finally put together in the late 70s was it actually in the 80s yeah in time for the session we had with the alums and others in 1983 fun we had John Atanasoff day correct really commemorating this wonderful man that's and he is charming let's let's look at the film and then we'll come back and chat some more with Steve Knutson the filmmaker hears from one Jhanvi at Nassau it's ironic that in this computer age the inventor of the electronic digital computer is not well-known the name of John Vincent Atanasoff was missing from the early books on electronic digital computing those written before 1974 and with good cause a patent had been issued to the developers of the ENIAC the earliest World War 2 electronic digital computer and the patent holders john mauchly and presper eckert were presumed to be the inventors but one book electronic digital systems by RK richards published in 1966 was alone with another viewpoint the ancestry of all electronic digital systems appears to be traceable to the Atanasoff very computer those words provided the beginning of a fascinating chain of events in 1935 I had a number of graduate students working in theoretical physics some of them were working on now the theory of how one obtained approximate solutions of problems in theoretical physics and some of them are doing actual calculations of the various fields of the subject these students we're having a great deal of trouble doing the calculations themselves it took me back to a day when I was working on long thesis and they were spending much more than a month doing actual calculations this problem of calculations press me very hard I tried to find various solutions I considered the possibility of getting a lot of marsh aunts or on rose and he'll come them together so they'd work in unison to make the solution faster the whole thing looked pretty hopeless there was no machine in existence suitable for my purpose and so I commenced to study the possibility of building a new machine and between 1935 and 1937 I spent my time thinking about these possibilities and I came up to one day in the fall of 1937 when I went out to my office to work in the evening and I realized I had made no progress and that things were really in a bad way finally I was so unhappy but I saw I couldn't get anything done and I did something that I didn't know stays I got in my car I drove for a long period of time at a high rate of speed I would give my attention to driving and not to my problems after driving the Raps three or four hours become aware of the surroundings and I'll cross from the Mississippi River I decided that I better slow down and see where I was going I looked ahead and there was a light and I soon realized that that was a tavern I went in there hung up the overcoat what will self a drink and that's it down and the cool atmosphere the Roadhouse I now reach the following conclusions on my computer machine I would use separate memory and computing structures this is going to be a large machine and we would isolate these two elements in ordinary computer machines they're usually rather interrelated I was going to use the binary number system the certain the whole structure would be substantially electronic and we would have electronic logic circuits we would use in a sequential system instead of powers of 10 we have powers of 2 and the lower powers of 2 would be computed first and then successively the higher powers of 2 this would be done by the same circuits since we could afford the since electronic circuits was so fast that we could afford the time and we would carry over on each power of 2 we're going to use the capacity a capacitor memory now the capacitor memory has seemed satisfactory because it would provide sufficient power to actuate the electronic circuits and it could be charged by the electronic circuits in order to use a fan Basti memory I had a jhaggat or sometimes it's sometimes called use regenerative circuits in this memory it's like a little boy going to a store and repeating a dozen eggs the powdered sugar over over again to prevent his forgetting what his mother told him to do at Nassau story about the role boy using a technique to remember what he wanted to get at the grocery store is illustrative of technique use in modern computing that is one of memory refreshing without it modern computing couldn't exist as it does today another important concept with j-b introduced for the use of the binary numbering system that is one in which there are only two digits 0 & 1 as opposed to our usual decimal numbering system in which there are 10 digits machines prior this time had been largely mechanical and used the decimal numbering system whereas JB introduced the idea of electronics into computing and used binary accounting system at the time a JV was working on his computers most people were interested in analog methods whereas JB introduced digital methods without which we couldn't have a computer as it is known today in the fall of 1939 I returned to Iowa State College to pursue a PhD in physics working with JB at NASA at the time I recall in October seeing the first prototype of a digital computer that at NASA I was working on and then one realized that they had the beginnings of a full-fledged computer they worked on the machine for the next two years pretty solidly and by the spring of 1941 had the machine pretty well along at which time I recalled John Mauchly visitings to see what the machine was like he spent most of a week with that mess off and very trying to see how the Machine worked and he got to see everything that was there about the machine World War two interrupted that and I saw us work on the computer he left Iowa State College to take a position with the Navy Department in Washington DC but before leaving he made arrangements with the college patent committee they were to file for the patent at an ass off and Barry prepared the descriptions the drawings and the working graphs for the claims they also visited the US Patent Office and consulted with a Chicago patent lawyer the minutes of the patent committee show their intention to file and there were I caching news releases the war effort brought repeated changes in personnel those responsible did not sense the significance of the device the consummation the actual filing for a patent never took place in Washington Atanasoff special talents were emerging he was awarded the US Navy Distinguished Service Award at a Nassif's Washington years were filled with achievement but his duties did not lead him to further work on computers this contrasted with the experience of dr. mark Lee the man who came to visit at an SOS computer World War two brought him a significant chain of events which culminated in another computer the Aniak dr. Arthur Burks a design participant in that development and moreover the report writer for the ante ACK tells that story any act was designed and built for the Army Ordnance Department it had a great need during the war for firing tables before any act firing tables were calculated by human computers all women one of whom later became my life I was one of a group of women who computed trajectories on a desk calculator we started out with a group of three women that eventually grew to something like 80 it took us a half a day to a day perhaps to do one trajectory and we needed 3,000 trajectories for one firing table the ENIAC was built at the Moore School of Electrical Engineering of the University of Pennsylvania the chief designers were Jay presper eckert and John W McLean the ENIAC was a huge machine completely filling a large room it had 18,000 vacuum tubes and calculated at the unprecedented speed of 100,000 pulses per second was divided into 30 units of three kinds computing units input output units and the master programmer a problem was put on the any act by plugging cables and setting switches it took several days to plan a problem for the ENIAC a day to plug up the Antioch and set switches and another day to debug the program once it was set up it computed trajectories for weeks on end this was much faster than calculating by hand we call that a human computer required as much as a day to calculate a single trajectory that is the path of a shell that took say 30 seconds to reach its target the ENIAC could compute this trajectory in 20 seconds faster than the shell could fly in 1950 john mauchly and presper eckert filed for a patent of the ENIAC but it was not issued until 1964 14 years later mark Lee and Eckert had assigned the patent to the sperry rand corporation in anticipation of the issue of the patent competing companies were paying Sperry Rand millions of dollars in royalties now these companies studied the patent in detail in Washington Alan Kirkpatrick the third a lawyer researching the patent for control data corporation read Richards book and those words the ancestry of all electronic digital systems appears to be traceable to the Atanasoff very computer in 1967 I knew I'd spent a portion of my life on computer machine but hardly anybody else knew anything about it during a summer I got a call from Kirkpatrick and he wanted to talk to me about what I knew about computing machines and mentions lying now after he'd talked to me mentioned my knowledge to the Honeywell people as a result I had two clients and I looked at my file and came up with a song cubic foot of records there were several challenges of the Aniak patent the most significant challenge came to court in Minneapolis when Sperry ran sued Honeywell for failure to pay royalties Honeywell filed a countersuit to recover payments already made their lawyers went to visit doctor at a Nassif and hired him as a consultant he was not a litigant but before the suit came to trial another computer connected episode took place Joby and I had a most marvelous opportunity to visit Bulgaria in July of 1970 we received a letter from dr. send-off dr. send-off had been in England independently researching early computer work and he came across JB's name and recognized it as Bulgarian so he came with this invitation to come to Bulgaria and he was invited to lecture at the Academy of Sciences during that first week and after the first week we were given a tour around the country the people of Bulgaria were so proud that a man who was the grandson of a patriot was also the inventor of the electronic digital computer and they came up to us in the street and asked to shake his hand and asked for autographs and it was such a beautiful thing and by special order of Parliament they had decorated him with the order of cyril and methodius which is the highest honor they can give to a scientist and we're very proud of it Bulgaria had recognized that an ass off as the inventor of the electronic digital computer now the FNS office were returning to the US and the litigation challenging the Antioch patent the ENIAC rightfully was widely acclaimed the work of Beckert MOC Lee and others had resulted in a superb accomplishment dr. Brooks again as a consequence of its speed and power the ENIAC saw problems previously beyond the reach of man thereby establishing the feasibility of electronic digital computation Atanasoff 2 studied the Antioch patent he came to realize that some of the claims in the Antioch patents were present in his own ABC computer but could he convince the court Barry was gone the ABC had been disassembled parts were scattered only a few remnants remained all at an ass off had was what he could remember of events of 20-30 years ago and what he could pull out of that solid foot of records suspense grew on the court your honor the Adhan ass off the Barry computer was a simple special purpose machine it was built only to solve linear simultaneous equations so I was clearly irritated about the attorneys for Sperry Rand who all was through it before the judge that this was a special purpose machine and didn't represent an originality in regard to the basic concepts of computing so I built a machine to solve linear systems but not an build machine I just didn't pick up something that somebody else had done but I build an entirely new system I had to conceive of new concepts and from the beginning the ENIAC on the other hand is a milestone in the advancement of the art of computing the progenitor for all electronic digital computers is the ENIAC your honor we're not here to minimize the notable achievements of the unique computer but to determine the origin of some of the claims I'd like to quote to you from a lot of September 30 1941 from john w mark lee to jb at nasa and i quote is there any objection from your point of view to my building some sort of computer which incorporates some of the features of your machine your machine being the at nasa very computer the decision in the case came on October 19th 1973 on the question of invention judge Earl our Larson concluded that Eckert and Mauchly did not themselves first invent the automatic electronic digital computer but instead derived that subject matter from one doctor John Vincent's Atanasoff the ENIAC patent was invalidated judge Larson had agreed with the statement in Richards book to put this whole matter in perspective let me comment on the origin of our modern electronic computer revolution it began with three steps the first was the Atanasoff Barre computer at Iowa State an electronic digital computer the second step was the any Act the first general purpose computer the third was a stored-program computer each step led directly to the next the principles at NASA developed for his machine were embodied in the ENIAC moreover he passed along to Mach Li an idea for generalizing his computer that inspired the concept of the ENIAC finally two of aten a soft sigh Diaz reused in the first stored program computer one was the regenerative principle of jogging the memory the other was the use of logic circuits for binary arithmetic the satin ass offs work served as a launch pad for the modern electronic computer after the trial some newspapers recognize the importance of the overturn of the ENIAC patents but once again the public was preoccupied with other events because of the way it all happened there was no corporate giant eager to champion a tan a soft cause and they found himself facing a frustrating period of relative obscurity but recognition is developing from Florida an honorary degree and then another Jhanvi added a South architect of a way of life I confer upon you the honorary degree Doctor of Science as I look now I would say that without my preparatory work why I probably would have been a couple of decades before we reach a stage not many decades no it's bound to come no question about it there is this to say about invention I remember just after World War two folks were discussing how long it would take Russia to gain access to the atomic secrets we had accomplished that in perhaps four years but we had a very large staff and a very able scientist someone guessed that it would take Russia at least eight years I said it will only take them two because they know it can be done it took them not much over here since the beginning many men have worked on computing and many have furnished elements that were important this applies to walk Lee Eckert some members of the staff such as Berks greater than others in a larger sense no man invents anything he builds an extensive with his friends and on the shoulders of others that an ass off has retired to his Maryland estate he has never received any money for the computer invention yet he lives comfortably because of his other accomplishments a man with much to remember I think that any particular aspect of human mental process that you want to organize a computer fool all the computer could do it faster and better than your man couldn't so we're in a peculiar position I don't know I don't think the computers will take over the world and command it but then some people today think computers are taking over their lives don't they well there you've seen it from one jaanvi at nasse off and in Steve that's really a line right from right from the findings that the mock LeAnn Decker did not themselves invent the first electronic computer but instead derived that information from one John the after Nassau right and so does the world really still recognize Gav though it's a big problem once you you see the any act existed for twenty years before this case came in and all that time history was tell it saying that it was the in yakin that these two gentlemen had invented it Ananya trying to change history of that kind you got a problem on your first rate problem and it's still somewhat up in the air although the recent book things that we heard and read in our Ames Tribune about the that's right and any documentary maker has to include the the questionable material as well as the stuff there's clear and he didn't even get it to the level of work would be discussing anyway the thing I think that really sets it apart right after the case was closed in Minneapolis the company that was that owned the rights to distribute had the right to appeal and they did not repeal now that tells you something about the quality point is they the point is they knew that it's a wonderful story Steve I appreciate your being here incidentally if any of you folks out there would like to look at any of these videotapes or films that we've featured in the ISU media message you can get a chance to see them by writing or calling to the media resources center here at Iowa State universe for Steve Knutson this is Bob Linda Mayer and thanks for watching you