Honeywell V. Sperry Rand - Derivation Controversy

Derivation Controversy

Finding 3 was the most controversial, as it assigned the invention of the electronic digital computer by judicial fiat to John V. Atanasoff:

Charges of derivation stemmed from testimony and correspondence describing meetings between Atanasoff and Mauchly in December 1940 and June 1941, the first at the University of Pennsylvania where Atanasoff attended a talk given by Mauchly at a meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science on use of Mauchly's harmonic analyzer (a simple analog computer) to speed the calculation of meteorological data to test for periodicities in precipitation, and the second in Ames, Iowa where Mauchly had driven to visit Atanasoff for a period of five days and to examine his progress on a special-purpose computing machine whose construction Atanasoff had described for Mauchly at the prior meeting. (In the discovery process leading up to Honeywell v. Sperry Rand, this device came to be called the Atanasoff–Berry Computer, or ABC; Clifford Berry had been Atanasoff's graduate student assistant in the computer development project in the basement of the physics building at Iowa State College and in 1942 the two of them left Iowa State for positions in war research—Atanasoff in Washington, D.C. and Berry in Pasadena, California.)

All parties agree that Mauchly had opportunity to see the ABC, which was then in a sufficiently advanced state of construction to demonstrate many if not all of its general principles. There is disagreement about (and no definitive evidence regarding) the extent to which Mauchly understood—or indeed was interested in or capable of understanding—the circuit designs incorporated in the machine. The ABC's inventors considered their invention novel and patentable. The same trip to Philadelphia in December 1940 included a visit to the Patent Office in Washington, D.C. to conduct patent searches—so Dr. Mauchly's contention under oath that the ABC's inventors were deliberately hesitant about revealing all of the machine's details would seem to be credible. All parties agreed that Mauchly took away with him no written technical description of the ABC. However, he was familiar enough with the ABC's basic method of operation, particularly the involvement of its rotating capacitor memory drum, to have described it to J. Presper Eckert in 1943 or 1944, and to have recounted it in some detail in a 1967 deposition, over 26 years after having visited the ABC in June 1941.

Correspondence from Mauchly to Atanasoff following Mauchly's visit was touted by the plaintiff as a smoking gun. Considered to be particularly damning to the Sperry Rand case were the following often-quoted excerpts:

Taken in context, this and other letters entered into evidence in Honeywell v. Sperry Rand evinced a spirit of cordiality and mutual admiration between Mauchly and Atanasoff, one that would continue into the 1940s, as Atanasoff recommended Mauchly for part-time consulting work at the Naval Ordnance Laboratory in 1943 and Mauchly continued to visit Atanasoff in White Oak, Maryland throughout 1944, where Mauchly served as mentor, guide, and sounding board to some of those on Atanasoff's staff.

Honeywell v. Sperry Rand and the decision it culminated in emphasized the differences between the ENIAC and the ABC, some of which were:

• The ENIAC and the ABC were both electronic digital computing machines, but the ABC was a special-purpose (i.e., non-programmable) machine intended to solve systems of linear equations via a modified Gaussian elimination algorithm.
• The two machines were incomparable in size, scope of design, and cost.
• Both the ENIAC and ABC used triode vacuum tubes, but the ABC computed logically using a binary adder circuits, whereas the ENIAC computed enumeratively using decimal ring counters. (For proponents of Mauchly's claims to have been influenced not by the ABC but by scaling circuits used to count cosmic rays at Swarthmore College, this is a significant distinction: if Mauchly derived any work from Atanasoff, why did he not appropriate for the ENIAC Atanasoff's add-subtract mechanism, in principle the most novel and enduring aspect of the ABC?)
• Most significantly to the legacies of the two devices, the ABC was never used in any practical way for the computational task for which it was constructed, owing in part to its need to write and read interim results to paper cards using an ill-conceived input-output system too error-prone for solving large systems of equations. The ENIAC, conversely, lived a useful service life spanning almost a decade, and was used for computational jobs in numerous scientific fields. Through its successor machine the EDVAC and the principles disseminated at the Moore School Lectures, the ENIAC influenced all future computing machines. The ABC was dismantled (with only a few of its basic components of its memory and arithmetic unit salvaged) without having been patented, published, or publicly demonstrated or described; thus it influenced no other computing machines, except insofar as such influence was transmitted through John Mauchly's exposure to the device (but again, derivation by Mauchly of any concept in the ABC is still a subject of controversy).

Following the ruling, some writers perceived recognition of Atanasoff for his title as "father of the computer" was slow in coming, and wrote books of their own. These included Pulitzer Prize-winning Iowan reporter Clark R. Mollenhoff and wife-and-husband team Alice Burks and Arthur Burks. (Arthur had been on the ENIAC's engineering staff and had requested to be added as a co-inventor following the issuance of the ENIAC patent; Alice Burks had been a computer at the Moore School.)

Since the time of the ruling, the IEEE Annals of the History of Computing has served as the principal battleground for articles debating the derivation controversy. Therein John Mauchly's widow Kay published her retort to the first Burks article following her husband's 1980 death. An article by Calvin Mooers, a former employee of Atanasoff's at the Naval Ordnance Laboratory, was published posthumously; in it, he questioned Atanasoff's commitment to and capacity for development of computing machines even when provided with ample financial resources.