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<table border="0" cellpadding="3" cellspacing="1" width="100%" class="forumline"> <tr> <th class="thCornerL" width="22%" height="26">Author</th> <th class="thCornerR">Message</th> </tr> <tr> <td width="22%" align="left" valign="top" class="row1"><span class="name"><a name=""></a><b>cekyophr5</b></span></td> <td class="row1" height="28" valign="top"><table width="100%" border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0"> <tr> <td width="100%"><img src="http://picsrv.fora.pl/subSilver/images/icon_minipost.gif" width="12" height="9" alt="Post" title="Post" border="0" /><span class="postdetails">Posted: Fri 9:32, 18 Oct 2013<span class="gen"> </span> Post subject: hollister sale An Ancient Feud Who Invented the C</span></td> </tr> <tr> <td colspan="2"><hr /></td> </tr> <tr> <td colspan="2"><span class="postbody">By: <br />My trip to Iowa State University to see a replica of the first computer ever built turned into a journey through an ancient feud after I noticed a quote on the wall behind the machine: "It's such an outlandish exaggeration to consider that he did it--it's a complete joke. He doesn't tell the truth--that's all. He did some little thing which he never finished and which wouldn't have worked if he had finished it." <br />Those words were spoken by J. Presper Eckert, Jr., the crotchety but brilliant engineer who designed most of the ENIAC, another computer constructed in the 1940's, but at the University of Pennsylvania. Mr. Eckert was talking about John V. Atanasoff, the late physics professor who built what Iowa State calls "the first digital electronic computer." An Iowa State graduate student, Charles Shorb, taped Eckert's quote on the wall to spur himself on as he built the replica. <br />The man behind the resurrection of Atanasoff's computer is John Gustafson, who has carefully arranged bright red hair and the neatest office I have seen in 11 years o interviewing professors. Dr. Gustafson's sense of order is matched by a zeal for righting what he sees as the greatest act of intellectual piracy in the 20th century. <br />Dr. Gustafson says that Atanasoff started working on a computer in the late 1930s with Clifford Berry, a graduate student. They finished the Atanasoff-Berry Computer, or ABC, in 1941. The replica, like the original, has been constructed in a basement room on a 6-foot-long steel frame that is painted black. The computer's control panel is a row of toggle switches and colored lights that looks like a junior-high-school science experiment. A resin cylinder, with copper pegs extending from it, turns to convert numbers from base 10--the sorts of numbers used every day--to base two. That binary design is still used in modern computers, because base-two numbers can be represented easily in bits, or switches that flip on and off. <br />Old IBM punch cards feed numbers into the ABC. Three hundred vacuum tubes do the actual calculations, but at interim stages the computer stores numbers by electrically burning a pattern of spots on sheets of paper. The computer can read the patterns back because the burnt spots conduct electricity better than paper that isn't burned. When the computer finishes its calculations, the answer is displayed on a device that looks like an odometer. <br />Historians, patent lawyers, and computer scientists have been arguing for years [url=http://www.sandvikfw.net/shopuk.php]hollister sale[/url] about what place the ABC should have in the technology hall of fame. "Everyone wants to be known as the father of the computer," [url=http://www.mnfruit.com/airjordan.php]jordan[/url] says Michael Williams, a professor of computer science at the University of Calgary and the editor of the Annals of the History of Computing, a journal. "There's lots of glory to be had and everyone has wanted their piece." <br />Fans of the ABC say modern computing was born in Atanasoff's mind in a roadhouse in Illinois, while he sipped a bourbon and soda. Frustrated by the problems he'd had in trying to build a machine to solve equations, he'd gone on a long drive. He wanted to solve differential equations to work on questions about the physics of crystals, the forces that govern atoms, and the design of electrical circuits. <br />"I needed a computer, and I needed a computer very, very badly," he told Joel Shurkin, the author of Engines of the Mind: The Evolution of the Computer from Mainframes to Microprocessors (W.W. Norton & Company, 1996). Mr. Shurkin, one of the few people to interview all of the inventors of the first computers, wrote about Atanasoff in the introduction to his book: "If he is really responsible for the computer, a grave injustice has [url=http://www.rtnagel.com/airjordan.php]jordan pas cher[/url] been done." But Mr. Shurkin concluded that Atanasoff's computer was a "clever near-miss." <br />The feud over credit for the computer's invention began after a five-day trip that the late John [url=http://www.jeremyparendt.com/Hollister-b5.php]hollister[/url] Mauchly, a physics professor at Ursinus College near Philadelphia, made to see Atanasoff in June 1941. Atanasoff charged that Mauchly was fascinated [url=http://www.rtnagel.com/airjordan.php]nike air jordan pas cher[/url] by the ABC and stole ideas from it for the ENIAC. But Mauchly said later that he had quickly realized Atanasoff's machine was a dud. <br />ENIAC fans believe the modern computer wan invented in discussions between Mauchly and Eckert over coffee and fruit sundaes at an all-night Philadelphia restaurant. According to Eckert, he and Mauchly first discussed trying to do complicated computations with mechanical components. "This is silly," Eckert said they decided. "Wires are cheaper than shafts and ball bearings and gears and things." <br />Mauchly, who left Ursinus College for the University of Pennsylvania, wanted to build a computer to solve "the problem of the weather." He believed he could analyze the weather and find mathematical patterns that could be used for forecasting. At Penn, his computer-building project drew the financial support of the Army, which needed complex calculations to produce the firing tables that are used to predict the paths of artillery shells. <br />The machine that Mauchly and Eckert finally built with military money became operational in 1946. It was 100 feet long, used 17,468 vacuum tubes, had 6,000 switches, and weighed 30 tons. It could add 5,000 numbers is a second. The ENIAC engineers put halves of Ping-Pong balls over the light bulbs that flashed during computations, creating striking images in newsreel stories about a new "electronic [url=http://www.shewyne.com/moncleroutlet.html]moncler sito ufficiale[/url] brain." <br />The ABC didn't, as far as anyone now knows, get any news coverage outside of Iowa. Atanasoff left Iowa State to work for the Navy during World War II, and the computer was dismantled. Atanasoff lived in obscurity after the war, but he surfaced again as a witness in a court battle between Sperry Rand Corporation and Honeywell Inc. that began in the late 1960s. Sperry Rand had the rights to a patent covering many features of electronic computers that had been awarded to Eckert and Mauchly in 1964. Sperry Rand said that Honeywell owed it royalties on the patent. <br />In a 1973 court decision that many newspapers didn't mention because they were devoting their attention to developments in the Watergate scandal, a judge ruled that Eckert and Mauchly's patent was invalid. John Atanasoff, the judge said, was the inventor of the first computer. The decision was never appealed, but many historian view it as the judge's effort to prevent Sperry Rand from dominating the young, rapidly developing computer industry. <br />Iowa State and the University of Pennsylvania each continue to praise the computers that were built on their campuses and to take subtle digs at the rival machines. Paul Shaffer, the curator of the [url=http://www.mnfruit.com/airjordan.php]jordan pas cher[/url] ENIAC last year, with the [url=http://www.jeremyparendt.com/jimmy-choo.php]jimmy choo chaussures[/url] technology-loving Vice-President Al Gore in attendance. On October 8 at the National Press Club in Washington, Iowa State hopes the ABC replica will perform for a crowd of journalists, at the beginning of a museum tour. <br />The devotees of antique computers say that today's engineers could learn from them. Dr. [url=http://www.jeremyparendt.com/Barbour-Paris.php]barbour france paris[/url] Gustafson says the ABC solved systems of equations with a [url=http://www.gotprintsigns.com/abercrombiepascher/‎]abercrombie soldes[/url] little more than three thousand bits of memory. He is annoyed when he hears today's software designers say they can't fit [url=http://www.jeremyparendt.com/jimmy-choo.php]jimmy choo paris[/url] a word-processing program into 16 megabytes--more than 144 million bits of memory. "I'd like to slap them," he says. <br />Mr. Shorb, the Iowa State graduate student who helped build the ABC, now lives in Oregon and is employed by Intel Corp., where he has worked on a computer that is ten trillion times faster than its Iowa State predecessor. Mr. Shorb remembers his time in the Iowa State basement fondly. "The fact that you could actually see the wires was neat," he says. "You don't see that much in modern computers." <br />Mr. Shaffer, the ENIAC Museum curator, has another job: helping the engineering school's computer users. He assists professors who want to create World-Wide Web sites, opens new computer accounts, and rescues those students who have forgotten their passwords. <br />I can imagine a relieved student at Penn [url=http://www.lcdmo.com/hollister.php]hollister pas cher[/url] returning to his dorm room with a new password and sitting down at his computer, eager to read his e-mail. 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