The Abc Computer

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The ABC Computer Beginning in 1935, John Vincent Atanasoff, a physics professor at Iowa State College, pioneered digital electronics for calculating. His students were working with linear partial differential equations, and he experimented with analog, then digital calculators to aid in their solution. Atanasoff built a simple model of the ABC to demonstrate his concepts of digital computation. The number stored in one of the capacitor drums is added to or subtracted from the number stored in the other drum. Atanasoff and graduate student Clifford Berry built a prototype ABC (Atanasoff-Berry Computer) in 1939, and a full-scale model in 1942. Like the Bell Labs Model I, the ABC was not a computer in the modern sense, since it lacked program control and was not general purpose. The ABC was the first of several proposals to use electronics for calculation or logic in the decade after Atanasoff began investigations in 1935. Other projects and proposals included those of Bush and Crawford both at M.I.T; Zuse and Schreier in Berlin; the British foreign office; Rajchman at R.C.A. The makers of the ENIAC, the first electronic computer, were familiar with Atanasoff's and Rajchman's work. The degree to which the ABC influenced the ENIAC design is still being debated by participants and historians. The Atanasoff computer was approximately the size of a large desk. It had approximately 270 vacuum tubes. Two hundred and ten tubes controlled the arithmetic unit, 30 tubes controlled the card reader and card punch, and the remaining tubes helped maintain charges in the condensers. The Atanasoff computer employed rotating drum memory. Each of the two drum memory units could hold about thirty fifty-bit numbers. The computer operator's console contained a series of buttons, meters, lights and controls, mounted on top of the computer's metal frame. The Atanasoff machine was used to

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