[Leica] Who invented the computer...or is the law an ass?

[Frank.Dernie at btinternet.com (Frank Dernie)]

I thought the first computer was designed by the Bletchley Park code 
breaking group during WW2. The father of the maths involved being Alan 
Turing, a gay man who is reputed to have killed himself by eating a poisoned 
apple when offered the choice between imprisonment and chemical castration 
following successful prosecution post war (homosexuality was illegal at the 
time). Because of the mega secrecy nobody was aware he was effectively a war 
hero responsible for shortening the war.
The story was apple computer was named in honour of him with the apple with 
bite missing logo.
Perhaps BS...
Frank

On 10 Mar, 2013, at 22:09, Herbert Kanner <kanner at acm.org> wrote:

> This is probably the last in my series of articles about things in the 
> Computer History Museum.
> 
> During World War II, the army was in a stew about the slow production of 
> ballistics tables for new artillery weapons. The tables were hand 
> calculated by women who had math degrees. John Mauchly and Presper Eckert 
> at the Moore School of Engineering of the University of Pennsylvania 
> invented a computer named ENIAC for producing these tables. It was a fully 
> programmable computer, could calculate anything. Eckert and Mauchly 
> patented it--this in itself is surprising, since it was supported by 
> government money. 
> 
> Eckert and Mauchly went on after the war to found the corporation which 
> sold a computer called UNIVAC. Ultimately, other companies went into the 
> computer business and a lawsuit occurred in 1967 between the UNIVAC 
> company and Honeywell, which refused to pay UNIVAC a license fee. A U.S. 
> District Court decided that the UNIVAC patent was invalid because of 
> never-patented but publicly disclosed prior art: a computer built by Iowa 
> State College physics professor John Vincent Atanasoff  and graduate 
> student John Berry. It was built in the period 1939-1942. For short, it 
> became known as the "ABC Computer". UNIVAC never appealed the decision.
> 
> Now here is what the ABC computer was designed to do. It would solve up to 
> 29 simultaneous linear equations in 29 variables. It would be fed two 
> equations and would eliminate one variable. This process would be 
> (manually) repeated using one of these shortened equations to shorten the 
> next equation. By repeating this process over and over again, the 
> equations would ultimately be solved. Sounds a pain, but far better than 
> trying to solve them by hand. That is all that the machine could do; 
> nothing else. 
> 
> Furthermore, if one wants to nit pick, the ABC Computer converted the 
> numbers to binary and worked with binary arithmetic, whereas the ENIAC 
> worked directly in decimal.
> 
> I suspect that courts are more sophisticated today and would have made a 
> different decision.
> 
> The original computer was too wide to be moved out of a standard door, and 
> ultimately various others at Iowa State liberated its parts. Eventually, 
> it got rebuilt with a slightly smaller case, and is now on loan to the 
> Computer History Museum.
> 
> http://gallery.leica-users.org/v/herbk1/L1002926.jpg.html
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Herbert Kanner
> kanner at acm.org
> 650-326-8204
> 
> Question authority and the authorities will question you.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> _______________________________________________
> Leica Users Group.
> See http://leica-users.org/mailman/listinfo/lug for more information