Given
all the rampant gadget patenting that goes on in the computer industry,
it's peculiar that computers themselves never got patented. But it
wasn't for lack of trying. Here's the twisted tale of one of the longest
patent battles in recent history.
When
we think of the computer's inventor, we most often probably think of
Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace's Difference and Analytical Engines, or
even the ancient Antikythera. Yet there is little or no direct
connection between those early calculating machines and the antecedents
of the modern computer developed in the 1940s.
Historian
I.B. Cohen identifies three types of devices that converged in the
first general-purpose computers: "early calculating machines,
statistical machines, and logical automata." The first of the general
purpose machines is assumed, by most people, to be the ENIAC.
ENIAC with programmers Glen Beck and Becky Snyder
The
ENIAC, for "Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer" was
constructed at the University of Pennsylvania's Moore School of
Engineering, under a contract from the U.S. Army, signed in 1943.
During
and immediately after the war, the Army requested additional machines
and the EDVAC (Electronic Discrete Variable Automatic Computer) was
begun, also at the Moore School, based on a "logical design"
(pdf) by John von Neumann. Within this design was the idea for the
stored program. Von Neumann "suggested that the instructions for the
computer—always before entered on punched paper tape, or by
plugboards—could be stored in the computer's electronic memory and
treated in exactly the same manner as numerical data."
Expand
John von Neumann with the Institute for Advanced Study Computer
Developed
for calculating artillery firing tables, the ENIAC was, almost
incidentally, the first general-purpose automatic computer, and was used
in the 1940s for weather prediction, atomic energy calculations, cosmic
ray studies, thermal ignition, random-number studies, and wind-tunnel
design. With the addition of the capacity to store programs, a capacity
articulated by von Neumann, and the utilization of binary logic rather
than decimal, the computer "architecture" attributed to von Neumann was
widely disseminated in the late 1940s and reproduced in different
iterations by institutions and corporations. This dissemination produced
the familiar acronymed machines associated with this first generation
of modern computers: ENIAC, EDVAC, EDSAC, ILLIAC, MANIAC, and UNIVAC.
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The Longest Patent Trial in History
After the war, J. Presper Eckert and John W. Mauchly, who had supervised the ENIAC's construction, applied for a patent
and formed their own computer company. Filed in 1947, the patent was
not granted until 1964. Bell Labs, among others, challenged Eckert and
Mauchly, whose company had been acquired by Sperry Rand after barely
escaping bankruptcy due to intense competition from other early computer
companies, especially IBM.
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