Pulitzer Prize-Winning Novelist Tells the Tale of the World’s First Computer | Magazine

Monday, November 22, 2010

Pulitzer Prize-Winning Novelist Tells the Tale of the World’s First Computer | Magazine



who invented the computer? For anyone who has made a pilgrimage to the University of Pennsylvania and seen the shrine to the ENIAC, the answer may seem obvious: John Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert Jr., who led Penn’s engineering team in the 1940s. As it says on the plaque, the giant machine made of 17,468 vacuum tubes was the “first electronic large-scale, general-purpose digital computer.” But notice all the qualifying adjectives. Does this mean there was a smaller digital computer that actually came first?


Yes, it does. And that computer was invented by John Vincent Atanasoff, who, with his partner Clifford Berry, started assembling the machine in the basement of the physics building at Iowa State University in the late 1930s. (It was finished in 1942.) Atanasoff, a physicist by training, was on the engineering faculty. Berry was a graduate student. Their computer, which was the size of a large desk, could do laborious mathematical calculations electronically using vacuum tubes to perform its logical operations. Now called the ABC (for Atanasoff-Berry computer), it was little known at the time. But it was admired by a small circle of brilliant inventors who were working on the problem of massive calculation, including John von Neumann at the Institute for Advanced Study and the engineers working on the ENIAC in Philadelphia.1


This fall, the unsung physicist is getting some of the credit he deserves from an unlikely author: Jane Smiley, the American novelist whose pastoral melodrama A Thousand Acres won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. She was captivated by the story and characters, “not for technical reasons as much as for narrative and psychological reasons.” In The Man Who Invented the Computer, she paints a portrait of a prickly, relentless engineering savant who got hooked on the problem of automatic computation while working on his dissertation in quantum mechanics, which required tedious calculations. After building his computer, he went on to tackle a series of unrelated challenges during the early years of the cold war, including measuring the effects of nuclear test explosions. He founded his own firm, received several patents, and died wealthy and respected. But Atanasoff’s greatest work, the first digital computer, was forgotten until the late 1960s, when a legal battle broke out over the patents that the ENIAC project leaders had filed on basic computing concepts.


In the course of the bruising litigation between the Sperry Rand Corporation, which had purchased the ENIAC patents, and Honeywell, which wanted to break them, it was proven that the ENIAC team stole key ideas from Atanasoff. The patents were declared invalid by a federal judge. But Atanasoff’s achievement never became widely known or celebrated.


Although he remained largely forgotten on both coasts, the legal case made Atanasoff something of a hero in Iowa. At Iowa State, where Smiley studied and taught for more than two decades, she met someone who plays a minor, ignominious role in her tale: a professor who told her that, as a graduate student, he had been the one to dismantle and throw away the prototype of some strange calculating device that had been left behind in the basement of the physics building. The first digital computer was lost. “He ultimately went on to become the head of the computer science department,” Smiley says, “and he told me that destroying that computer was one of the great regrets of his life.” It is out of such personal twists and ironies—a novelist’s materials—that Smiley builds her tale, capturing both Atanasoff’s genius and, at the same time, the forces of chance that influence invention.


Wired: As a writer, most of your career has been dedicated to the novel. Why did you take on this biography?


Jane Smiley: I was asked by an editor to consider writing something about an American inventor. I asked him if he knew who invented the computer. He said he didn’t. In that case, I told him, I should write a book about John Vincent Atanasoff.


Wired: We think of the ENIAC as the first computer. But what did the team that built it copy from Atanasoff?


Smiley: In 1937, Atanasoff came up with four principles that were new: electronic logic circuits that would function by turning on and off; binary enumeration; the use of capacitors, which were needed as a kind of memory; and digital operations, which used counting to perform calculations. The calculating machines of that time were like elaborate slide rules that used measurements to compute results, but Atanasoff, who was trained as a quantum physicist, understood that this would be very unwieldy for large numbers. He didn’t want to measure, he wanted to count.


Wired: Atanasoff introduced the concept of digital calculation? Nobody else had considered this approach?


Smiley: Konrad Zuse, in Berlin, also did. Zuse built his first computer, the Z1, in his parents’ apartment. But he never got to patent it, and he never got to have his ideas influence computing, because he was so far outside the mainstream, working in isolation in Nazi Germany.


Wired: Didn’t Alan Turing, the great British mathematician, give the definitive description of a computer that proceeded by discrete steps?


Smiley: Turing was mainly a theoretician. He worked for the British government during the Second World War on the great code-breaking machine Colossus. But this also remained relatively unknown, because Churchill was obsessed with keeping it secret and ordered all the machines destroyed.

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Why Windows Phone 7 Will Make Android Look Chaotic

Tuesday, October 12, 2010

Microsoft may be late to the game with a consumer-savvy phone OS, but Windows Phone 7 is aiming to do right a lot of what Google is doing wrong. Based on what I saw during a visit to Microsoft’s headquarters two weeks ago, the Windows Phone 7 team may be on the right track to pose a serious threat to Google. The crucial part of Microsoft’s new phone strategy is the quality control it imposes onto its hardware partners. Rather than code an operating system and allow manufacturers to do whatever they want with it — like Google is doing with Android — Microsoft is requiring hardware partners to meet a rigid criteria in order to run Windows Phone 7. Each device must feature three standard hardware buttons, for example, and before they can ship with Windows Phone 7, they have to pass a series of tests directed by Microsoft. (As I mentioned in a feature story about Windows Phone 7, Microsoft has created new lab facilities containing robots and automated programs to test each handset to ensure that features work properly and consistently across multiple devices.) The effort to control quality and consistency may be just what Microsoft needs to regain some ground in the phone battle. In the wake of the iPhone revolution, Windows Mobile saw a serious decline in market share; the computer-ey, feature-loaded interface just didn’t cut it anymore. Windows Phone 7 is Microsoft’s complete do-over on a mobile operating system, with a slick new tile-based UI. The first Windows Phone 7 handsets are due in stores November. With brand new test facilities, Microsoft is taking on the duty of ensuring that touchscreens and sensors are calibrated properly, for example, and each hardware model undergoes software stress tests to catch bugs and system errors (see picture above). The end result should be getting very close to the same OS on smartphones made by different manufacturers. That in turn could mitigate the issue of fragmentation for third-party developers: They can effectively code the same app for a large party of devices without much tweaking. By contrast, Google doesn’t subject manufacturers to similar testing criteria. And we’re seeing the consequences: Some touchscreens work better than others, some apps don’t work on one version of Android while they do on another, and some manufacturers are even cramming bloatware onto Android devices. Most importantly, a consistent user experience will help customers understand what they’re getting when they’re shopping for a Windows phone. The OS is going to be the same with identical features on every handset, so as a consumer, your decision-making will boil down to the hardware’s look, weight and size. Compare that to the experience of buying an Android phone, which could be running a different version depending on the handset you buy: Donut, Eclair, Froyo, blueberry pie, Neapolitan or whatever Google chooses to call it eventually. You won’t have to ask yourself, “Am I going to get X on this phone or do I have to get another one?” because they’re all running the same OS with a few variations in hardware. The inevitable question that arises is what Windows Phone 7 means as a competitor to iOS. It’s tough to say. I haven’t spent quite enough time with a final version of a Windows Phone 7 device yet. Still, I think the Phone 7 user interface is refreshingly different compared to the siloed-app experience of iOS. But Apple is so far ahead in terms of cultivating a rich mobile ecosystem that I don’t think Steve Jobs needs to be sweating just yet. Google, though, needs to get Android’s story together, because the fickle platform gets more confusing and convoluted every day, and it could have the same destiny as Windows Mobile.

 Source WIRED