PREHISTORY OF COMPUTING: CHARLES BABBAGE
Charles Babbage is widely credited with the prehistoric mechanical computers. For completeness we are making mention and redirecting you to one of the references on the topic. But will not go into it except for to say that this was essentially a mechanical calculator with gears that might be compared to the oddometer in your car.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atanasoff%E2%80%93Berry_computerTHE FIRST ELECTRONIC COMPUTER: ABC COMPUTER – ATANASOFF BERRY COMPUTER 1939.
John Atanasoff was a physicist and mathematician at Iowa State College. The story goes that in 1937 Prof. Atanasoff had a mechanical calculator in his office and one day he was curious about how it worked. So he began disassembling it to understand its construction and concepts when the calculator walked into his office and rebuked Prof. Atanasoff telling him to never touch HIS calculator again.
But Prof. Atanasoff thought about it a while and said to himself I am a professor of electronics (for however electronics was pre-natal in 1939) and came up with the idea of building an electronic computer. He consulted with his mother who was a mathematician and recommended building it using binary (0’s and 1’s or otherwise referred to as base 2. This level of math is beyond the scope of this webposting. But suffice it to say you have 10 fingers so base 10 is natural for you (digits 0 to 9). Computers love base 2.
Prof. Atanasoff put together a project plan and requested $650 from the university – $400 for his assistant Clifford Berry and $250 for parts. The grant was approved and they worked on the project from 1939 to 1942 and began publishing articles on the project in academic journals. So for more information please double click here.
THEN J. Presper Eckert and John Mauchly Read Prof. ATANASOFF’s ARTICLES
Next Eckert and Mauchly asked for a meeting with Prof. Atanasoff and they discussed the project. At this point the USA was working on the Manhattan Project and desperately needed the computational capabilities of a powerful electronic computer. So Eckert and Mauchly requested a modest grant of $200,000 to build the Eniac. By 1945 Eniac was the world’s first large scale programmable computer and it help accelerate work on the Manhattan Project to complete the atomic bomb. And then USA proceeded to bomb Hiroshima and Nagasaki after Pearl Harbor and won World War 2. Later in 1947 Eckert and Mauchly filed a patent on the Eniac beating out Prof. Atanasoff and Clifford Berry.
Not a bad investment either $650 and/or $200,000.
