Pioneers of computing

[Paul Koning]

> On Mar 13, 2019, at 12:02 AM, Chuck Guzis via cctalk <cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote:
> 
> ...
> This is a bit interesting in that Brattain, Bardeen and Shockley are
> credited in the popular press as having invented the transistor.
> However, that was a bit overstated; they had to re-word their patent
> application to state that they'd developed a "junction" transistor, when
> a patent search turned up the fact that a Hungarian immigrant named
> Julius Lilienfeld had obtained a patent on a field-effect transistor in
> 1930--a full year before he obtained a patent on the electrolytic
> capacitor (ever heard of those?.  Dr. J applied for the patent in 1926,
> which is a bit mind-boggling, when you consider that tubes like the
> UV20A1 were introduced in 1924.   It's those field-effect transistors
> that are widely used today, not Shockley and chums' bipolar cousins.

My father had an article about those FETs in his files somewhere, unfortunately it was lost years ago but I remember it.  I think the semiconductor used was copper oxide.

Interesting that they actually found this.  There are many examples of the same thing being patented several times, or a thing being invented long after it was first built.  An example of the former is frequency modulation (patented in 1927 by Idzerda, then in 1935 by Armstrong).  An example of the latter is Abraham Lincoln's patent for what a Dutchman would recognize as a "camel" -- a device for carrying ships over shoals that goes back a century or two from Lincoln's patent.

> Such is history and those who write accounts of it.  Names like
> Atanasoff and Zuse are consigned to the dustbin of history, while Eckert
> and Mauchly get the historical mention.

That's what makes it interesting to dig into the less known corners of technology history.  I've enjoyed poking into Electrologica, which did a number of things early on, perhaps earlier than others that are well known or at least around the same time.  The core ROM I mentioned is an example (it looks vaguely like Ken Olsen's design that became the Apollo Computer ROM, but the operation is different and somewhat more efficient, with a shorter read latency).  They also seem to have been the first to deliver interrupts in a commercial computer as a standard feature.  But because of location and limited sales, few people even know the company's name, let alone much about it.

	paul