ENIAC ....

On 2011 Jan 23, at 6:37 AM, Evan Koblentz wrote: Because it depends on the definition one is working with. As usual, we are in the realm of varying definitions. If we go with the modern understanding of the word, neither the ABC or ENIAC was a computer. Perhaps people should stick to facts: "this did that"; rather than declarations: "this was that". All these machines had their contributions. ENIAC doesn't get to claim everything, and when you boil off all the hyperbole on both sides, I think that was the primary point or outcome of the court case. I drew up this years ago when I was reading more about these issues: http://www3.telus.net/~bhilpert/tmp/conceptsmachines.gif although I don't think I was the first to arrive at such a diagram. Of course there are various improvements that could be made. And I suppose there may be arguments about the arrow from the ABC to ENIAC. This is not correct. On my site at: http://www.cs.ubc.ca/~hilpert/e/ABC/omflow.html is a flowchart of the problem solving process using the ABC. Note it carefully distinguishes between what the human operator did and what the ABC did. Note the portions in blue (particularly in stages 2,3,4) include a loop structure with decisions and calculations (on multiple 50-bit binary numbers), all performed automatically. There were 2 or 3 mostly-hard-wired programs in the ABC, those programs had some plug-board flexibility and were data-sensitive. I'm not entirely disagreeing with you but this strikes me as another grey area. Yes, Mauchly was researching automatic computation prior to ENIAC, for other than ballistics purposes. However, I've never seen anything to suggest he had arrived at the design that would become the ENIAC before his time at the Ballistics lab. I'd guess it highly likely Mauchly had his greater purposes in mind as he and Eckert designed ENIAC, but I believe the design of ENIAC took place in the working environment of the Ballistics Lab and was very much targeted at the ballistics calculations it was funded for. The Army funded ENIAC for a specific purpose, not as a general or head-in-the-clouds research effort. On the other hand, I also like to argue the developments would have taken place regardless of the military and the only reason the ENIAC was a 'military' machine was (as with the mis-attribution to Willi Sutton) "That's where the money is". It was a case of desire and interest (a researcher wanting greater computing capabilities), meeting dire and timely need (war/ballistics) which motivated funding (from society through the Army). Yes, the ABC (like Colossus) was limited in it's flexibility relative to ENIAC. The ABC was a small project compared to the others being spoken of. There was one aspect of it (base-2 card printing and punching) that had a problematic error rate. The processing and memory aspects apparently did well. That was a different effort and project than the ABC, let's not confuse them. Yes, the ABC was limited by the mechanical drum rotation. However, in his paper about the ASM (Add-Subtract Mechanism[1]), Atanasoff did recognise and promote that the arithmetic or logical computation through that mechanism took place at electronic speeds. To mention, all the drum computers (IBM 650, Bendix G-15, LGP-30, etc) of the 50s were electromechanical by this definition. [1] Use of the word 'Mechanism' in the name is a bit of an anachronism - the ASM was a fully electronic mechanism.