Other articles in the series:
- History of the relay
- History of electronic computers
- History of the transistor
- Internet history
As we saw in , radio and telephone engineers in search of more powerful amplifiers opened up a new technological field, which was quickly dubbed electronics. An electronic amplifier could easily be turned into a digital switch, operating at a much higher speed than its electromechanical relative, the telephone relay. With no mechanical parts, the vacuum tube could turn on and off in a microsecond or less, rather than the tens of milliseconds or more required by the relay.
Between 1939 and 1945, three computers were built from these new electronic components. It is no coincidence that the dates of their construction coincide with the period of the Second World War. This conflict - unparalleled in history in terms of how it yoked people to the yoke of the chariot of war - forever changed the relationship between states and between science and technology, and also brought a large number of new devices to the world.
The stories of the first three electronic computers are intertwined with war. The first one was dedicated to the deciphering of German messages, and remained under the cloak of secrecy until the 1970s, when it was no longer of any interest, except for the historical one. The second, which most readers must have heard of, was ENIAC, a military calculator that was completed too late to help in the war. But here we will consider the earliest of these three machines, the brainchild of .
Atanasov
In 1930, Atanasov, the American-born son of an emigrant from , finally achieved his youthful dream and became a theoretical physicist. But, as with most such aspirations, the reality was not what he had hoped for. In particular, like most students of engineering and physical sciences in the first half of the XNUMXth century, Atanasov had to suffer from the agonizing burden of constant calculations. His dissertation at the University of Wisconsin on the polarization of helium required eight weeks of tedious calculations using a mechanical desktop calculator.
John Atanasoff in his youth
By 1935, having already settled down as a professor at the University of Iowa, Atanasoff decided to do something about this burden. He began to consider possible ways to build a new, more powerful computer. Rejecting analog methods (such as the MIT differential analyzer) for reasons of limitation and inaccuracy, he set out to build a digital machine that dealt with numbers as discrete values ββrather than as continuous measurements. He was familiar with the binary number system from his youth and understood that it fits much better on the structure of the on / off digital switch than the usual decimal numbers. So he decided to make a binary machine. And finally, he decided that for it to be as fast and flexible as possible, it should be electronic, and use vacuum tubes for calculations.
Atanasov also had to decide on the space of tasks - for which calculations should his computer be suitable? In the end, he decided that he would be solving systems of linear equations, reducing them to a single variable (using ) - the same calculations that prevailed in his dissertation. It will support up to thirty equations, with up to thirty variables in each. Such a computer could solve problems that are important for scientists and engineers, and at the same time, it would not seem to be incredibly complicated.
Piece of art
By the mid-1930s, electronic technology had reached an extraordinary diversity compared to its origins 25 years earlier. Two developments suited Atanasov's project particularly well: the trigger relay and the electronic counter.
Since the 1918th century, telegraph and telephone engineers have had a handy device called a switch at their disposal. A switch is a bistable relay that uses permanent magnets to hold it in the state you left it inβopen or closedβuntil it receives an electrical signal to switch states. But vacuum tubes were not capable of this. They had no mechanical component and could be "open" or "closed" as long as electricity flowed or did not flow through the circuit. In 1, two British physicists, William Eccles and Frank Jordan, connected two lamps with wires in such a way that they got a βtrigger relayβ - an electronic relay that remains constantly on after switching on from the initial impulse. Eccles and Jordan created their system for telecommunications purposes for the British Admiralty at the end of the First World War. But the Eccles-Jordan circuit, later known as the trigger [eng. flip-flop] could also be considered as a device for storing a binary digit - 0 if the signal is transmitted, and XNUMX otherwise. In this way, through n flip-flops, it was possible to represent a binary number of n digits.
Ten years after the trigger, the second major breakthrough in electronics hit the world of computing: electronic meters. Once again, as so often in the early history of computing, boredom was the mother of invention. Physicists who have studied the emission of subatomic particles have either had to listen to clicks or study photographic recordings for hours, counting the number of detections to measure the speed of emission of particles by various substances. Mechanical or electromechanical counters offered a tempting way to facilitate these actions, but they moved too slowly: they could not register many events that occurred with a difference of milliseconds.
The key figure in solving this problem was who worked under Ernest Rutherford at the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge. Wynn-Williams had a knack for electronics, and had already used tubes (or valves, as they were called in Britain) to build amplifiers that could be used to hear particle events. In the early 1930s, he realized that valves could be used to create a counter, which he called a "binary scale counter" - that is, a binary counter. In essence, it was a set of triggers that could pass switches up the chain (in practice, he used , types of lamps containing not vacuum, but gas, which could remain in the on position after the gas was completely ionized).
The Wynn-Williams counter quickly became a must-have laboratory device for anyone involved in particle physics. Physicists built very small counters, often containing three digits (that is, capable of counting up to seven). for a slow mechanical counter, and for recording events occurring faster than a counter with slow moving mechanical parts could register.
But in theory, such counters could be extended to numbers of arbitrary size or precision. These were, strictly speaking, the first digital electronic calculating machines.
Atanasoff-Berry computer
Atanasoff was familiar with this story, which convinced him of the possibility of building an electronic computer. But he did not directly use binary counters or triggers. First, for the basis of the counting system, he tried to use slightly modified counters - after all, what is addition, if not repeated counting? But for some reason, he could not make counting circuits reliable enough, and he had to develop his own addition and multiplication schemes. He could not use flip-flops to temporarily store binary numbers because he was on a budget and had the ambitious goal of storing thirty coefficients at once. As we shall soon see, this situation had serious consequences.
By 1939, Atanasoff had finished designing his computer. Now he needed a person with the right knowledge to build it. He found such a person in an Iowa State Institute of Engineering graduate named Clifford Berry. By the end of the year, Atanasoff and Berry had built a small prototype. The following year, they completed the full version of the computer at thirty odds. In the 1960s, a writer who unearthed their story called it the Atanasoff-Berry Computer (ABC), and the name stuck. However, all the shortcomings could not be eliminated. In particular, ABC gave an error of about one binary digit in 10000, which would be fatal for any large calculation.
Clifford Berry and ABC in 1942
However, in Atanasoff and his ABC one can find the roots and source of all modern computers. Didn't he create (with Berry's able help) the first binary electronic digital computer? Aren't these the core characteristics of the billions of devices that shape and govern economies, societies, and cultures around the world?
But let's go back. The adjectives digital and binary are not the prerogative of ABC. For example, the Bell Complex Number Computer (CNC), developed around the same time, was a digital, binary, electromechanical computer capable of computing in the complex plane. Also, ABC and CNC were similar in that they solved problems in a limited area, and could not, unlike modern computers, accept an arbitrary sequence of instructions.
It remains "electronic". But while the mathematical innards of the ABC were electronic, it ran at electromechanical speeds. Since Atanasoff and Berry could not, for financial reasons, use vacuum tubes to store thousands of binary digits, they used electromechanical components to do this. Several hundred triodes that performed basic mathematical calculations were surrounded by rotating drums and humming punching machines, which stored intermediate values ββββof all computational steps.
Atanasoff and Berry did a heroic job of reading and writing data to punched cards at great speed, burning them with electricity instead of mechanically punching holes in them. But this led to its own problems: it was the burner that was responsible for 1 error per 10000 numbers. Moreover, even with their best efforts, the machine could not βpunchβ faster than one line per second, so ABC could only perform one calculation per second with each of the thirty arithmetic units. For the rest of the time, the vacuum tubes sat idle, impatiently βdrumming their fingers on the tableβ as all this machinery revolved agonizingly slowly around them. Atanasov and Berry fastened the thoroughbred horse to the cart with hay. (A project manager to recreate the ABC in the 1990s estimated the maximum speed of the machine, taking into account all the time spent, including the work of the operator on the task, at five additions or subtractions per second. This, of course, is faster than a human computer, but not the speed , which we associate with electronic computers.)
ABC scheme. The drums stored temporary input and output on capacitors. The thyratron card punching circuit and the card reader recorded and read the results of an entire step of the algorithm (eliminating one of the variables from the system of equations).
Work on the ABC ground to a halt in mid-1942 when Atanasoff and Berry signed up for the rapidly growing US war machine, where not only bodies but also brains were needed. Atanasov was called to the Naval Ordnance Laboratory in Washington to lead a team that was developing acoustic mines. Berry married Atanasoff's secretary and found himself a job with a military contract company in California so he wouldn't be drafted into the war. Atanasoff tried for some time to patent his creation in Iowa, but to no avail. After the war, he took up other things, and no longer took computers seriously. The computer itself was sent to a landfill in 1948 to make room in the office for a new graduate of the institute.
Perhaps Atanasoff simply started working too early. He was based on modest university grants and could only spend a few thousand dollars to build the ABC, so frugality superseded all other concerns in his project. If he had waited until the early 1940s, he might have received a government grant for a complete electronic device. And in this state - with limited use, with complex controls, unreliable, not very fast - ABC did not become a promising advertisement for the benefits of electronic computing. The American war machine, for all its computational hunger, left the ABC to rust in the town of Ames, Iowa.
Computing machines of war
The First World War created and launched a system of massive pumping of investments in science and technology, and prepared it for the Second World War. In just a few years, the practice of warfare on land and at sea has shifted to the use of poison gases, magnetic mines, aerial reconnaissance and bombardment, and so on. No political or military leader could fail to notice such rapid changes. They were so fast that research started early enough could tip the balance one way or the other.
The United States had enough materials and brains (many of which had fled Hitler's Germany) and stood aloof from the immediate battles for survival and dominance affecting other countries. This allowed the country to learn this lesson especially clearly. This was manifested in the fact that vast industrial and intellectual resources were thrown into the creation of the first atomic weapon. Less well-known, but equally important or smaller, was the investment in radar technology, which was centered at MIT's Rad Lab.
So the nascent field of automatic computing received its share of military funding, albeit on a much smaller scale. We have already noted the variety of electromechanical computing projects generated by the war. The potential of relay-based computers was, relatively speaking, known, since telephone exchanges with thousands of relays had been in operation for many years by that time. Electronic components have not yet been proven to work on such a scale. Most experts believed that the electronic computer would inevitably be unreliable (ABC was an example), or it would take too long to build. Despite the sudden influx of government money, military electronic computing projects were few and far between. Only three were launched, and only two of them led to the appearance of workable machines.
In Germany, telecommunications engineer Helmut Schreyer proved to his friend Konrad Zuse the value of an electronic machine in front of the electromechanical "V3" that Zuse was building for the aeronautical industry (later known as the Z3). Zuse eventually agreed to work on a second project with Schreyer, and the Aviation Research Institute offered to fund a 100-lamp prototype in late 1941. But the two men first took on higher priority military work, and then their work was greatly slowed down by the damage caused by the bombing, as a result, they could not get their car to work reliably.
Zuse (right) and Schreyer (left) work on an electromechanical computer in the Berlin apartment of Zuse's parents
And the first electronic computer that did useful work was built in a secret laboratory in Britain, where a telecommunications engineer proposed a radical new approach to cryptanalysis based on valves. We will reveal this story next time.
What else to read:
β’ Alice R. Burks and Arthur W. Burks, The First Electronic Computer: The Atansoff Story (1988)
β’ David Ritchie, The Computer Pioneers (1986)
β’ Jane Smiley, The man Who Invented the Computer (2010)
Source: habr.com