Surely many inventors, illuminated by brilliant thoughts, have repeatedly said to themselves - but I could have invented it. But there are at least two among them who "almost invented" something that will turn the whole world upside down. Today's story is about the first electronic digital computer ABC, which was prevented from being "reinvented" and introduced by the Second World War. Yes, there were still seven years left before the invention of ENIAC!
This pair of practically geniuses is John Atanasov and Clifford Berry, who practically constructed the ABC in 1939. The idea belonged to Atanasov, who since the mid-1930s set himself the idea of automating complex equations and systems of equations. He even tried to modify the IBM calculator, but he could not. At the same time, an acquaintance with Berry took place.
This is how he was - the first one: big, without toys …
The researchers received a grant of five thousand dollars to develop the future machine in 1939, and showed the first working model in the same year. Then, for three years, work at FIS continued and the only node that was never completed was the scheme for reading binary cards, without which it was impossible to store and load intermediate results of work. However, the computing part has been working since 1941.
The newspaper "Des Moines Register" in '41 published an article describing the ABC machine: it weighed three hundred and twenty kg, the size of a desk, had two hundred eighty two-triode vacuum tubes plus thirty-one thyratrons inside. And also more than one and a half kilometers of wire.
The only problem that ABC had to solve was the solution of large systems of linear algebraic equations. Binary arithmetic was used with a word length of the order of fifty bits. The internal memory could store the coefficients of the two equations, and the intermediate results had to be stored on punched cards. ABC had two storage devices.
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They were rotating drums with contacts and capacitors attached to the contacts, which occupied 5/6 of the surface. The blank area was needed to allow time for other operations. The drums were rotated by a gear synchronous motor, which rotated a revolution per minute. Capacitors (or rather, the polarity of the charge on them) indicated "0" or "1", and then recharged.
In 1942, World War II confused the plans of the inventors and stopped the development of ABC. In 1948, the original was disassembled, but in the late 90s, in memory of John Atanasov and Clifford Berry, a replica of the car was assembled, exhibited at the Mountain View Museum of Computer History, California. Despite its imperfections, the machine contained many ideas that are still used in computers today.