U.S. NEWS AND WORLD REPORT
08-14-06
After Lots of Small Steps, It Adds Up
BYLINE: Peter Meredith
Like many great inventions, the computer ended up as Exhibit A in a patent
dispute in federal court. In 1967, the Honeywell corporation filed a suit claiming
that the Sperry Rand company's electronic numerical integrator (ENIAC)
infringed on its patents to computer technology. When the judge ruled in favor of
Honeywell and the rights it held to the Atanasoff-Berry computer, Iowa State
College math and physics Prof. John Atanasoff effectively became the father
of the computer.
That is, if any one person ever really could claim the credit for technology built on
decades of smaller advances. For example, as far back as the 1830s, Charles
Babbage in London had designed an "analytical engine" to execute not just
arithmetical operations but algebraic ones as well. (A nice plus: It would also print
out the results.) In 1936, Alan Turing--a Briton who later helped break Nazi
Germany's Enigma code--realized algorithms--essentially math-problem
blueprints--could be used by machines to record procedures. Today's computers
store programs in algorithms to carry out millions of finite procedures.
Douglas Thomas, a professor at the University of Southern California, says
another transitional moment was the U.S. Navy's decision during World War II to
ask the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for a computer that could operate
a flight simulator. The result was Whirlwind. "It was finally fast enough to do
complex equations in a practical amount of time," says Thomas.
The first commercially available computer, designed by the same University of
Pennsylvania professors who invented ENIAC, was the UNIVAC I, and the
customer was the U.S. Census Bureau.
As for the personal computer, its invention was "almost an accident of history,"
says Dag Spicer, senior curator of the Computer History Museum in Mountain
View, Calif. In the '70s, Silicon Valley was awash with low-cost tech parts, local
know-how, and young companies such as Intel and National Semiconductor that
were happy to give amateurs a good deal.
In 1975, when Ed Roberts started selling microprocessor-based you-build-it Altair
8800 kits from his model-rocket hobby shop in Albuquerque, N.M., it made the
front page of Popular Electronics. In fact, Thi T. Truong, a Vietnamese immigrant
to France, had built the first microprocessor-based computer 18 months before
the Altair 8800 was introduced. But nearly all of the 2,000-some models of his
MICRAL went to industrial customers (many ended up in highway tollbooths)
rather than computer hobbyists. Otherwise, he might have taken quite a bite out
of Apple.