For historians of automated computing only: A review of Who Invented The Computer? The Legal Battle That Changed Computing History by Alice Rowe Burks 1 .
Robert M. French · 2004
The Myth of who invented the computer, as described in Alice Burks’ book, goes some thing like this. Struggling to develop a special-purpose electronic computing machine, John Vincent Atanasoff is at an impasse. He takes a 200-mile drive at high speed in the winter of 1937, stops at a roadside tavern, and after a couple of bourbon-and-waters, solves his problem, thus giving birth to the Computer Age. This brilliant, but naive, scientist freely shares his revolutionary ideas with an evil house-guest, John Mauchly, who purloins them. Based partly on Atanasoff’s ideas, Mauchly and co-conspirator J. Presper Eckert build ENIAC, falsely billed as the world’s first electronic computer. Mauchly and Eckert become world famous and Atanasoff, devastated, is forgotten. But, as luck would have it, a patent infringement trial thirty years later allows the modest Atanasoff to convince Judge Earl Larson that he, not Mauchly or Eckert, is the rightful Inventor of the Computer. The judge finds in favor of Atanasoff and the ruling goes unchallenged. David has slain Golaith; the Underdog has won the day. The End. The problem is that the story of who invented the computer – which, ostensibly, is what this book is about -- is far m ore broad and complex than the Myth. The present book focuses narrowly on the 1971 court case between Honeywell and Sperry-Rand that brought Atanasoff to the public eye. The book’s use of the transcripts of that court case to defend Atanasoff as the inventor of the first special-purpose electronic computer is meticulous in the extreme – at times, excessively so – and will, no doubt, prove to be a valuable tool for future historians of automated computing. The meat of Burks’ book is found in the first section (“Nothing But the Truth”) in which Mauchly’s and Atanasoff’s testimony and cross-examination are presented along with Judge Earl Larson’s findings as to exactly why he found the ENIAC patent invalid. The message from the bench was as clear as it was significant, viz., the invalidation of the ENIAC computer patent was justified because of prior work done by John Atanasoff and his graduate student, Clifford Berry, and knowingly incorporated into the ENIAC patent without crediting either Atanasoff or Berry. A single confusing point in Larson’s decision — namely, that parts of the ENIAC patent were based on prior work done by Atanasoff, thus invalidating the patent, while still maintaining that Mauchly and Eckert were the co-inventors of ENIAC — is clearly explained to the reader. That said, with the exception of chapter 9 on Von Neumann’s role in the developm ent of the computer, the remainder of the book after the first section can be put aside. It is mostly, if not exclusively, a tedious description of personal disputes and problems with one adversary after another. The size of this book could, without difficulty, have been reduced by half.