Jane Smiley : author of the man who invented the computer : the biography of John Atanasoff, digital pioneer; January 27, 2011

Transcription

1 Hollar: Welcome. Smiley: Thank you. Hollar: Glad you're here. Smiley: Thank you. Before we start, though, I would like for John Gustafson to stand up again, yes, and Robert Armstead. Where are you, Bob? Oh, okay. John was my technical support, and he will answer technical questions as soon as I start going um, um, oh, he'll stand up and answer. And Bob was my mathematical support. He teaches at The Naval Post Graduate School down in Monterey, and is a Quantum Physicist, so if there's anything you don't understand about string theory Bob is happy to explain it. Armstead: Thank you. Hollar: So let's start with just some process questions. Can we do that? Smiley: Okay, sure, anything. Hollar: What led you to write this book? Smiley: Well, I had written a book in a series before. Sometimes people, publishers call me up and they want me to participate in a series, and usually the definition of the series is this group of people, or these people are important for some reason. And in this case the series was about American inventors, and they wanted me to write a book about Norman Borlaug, and hybrid seed, I just couldn't get it. I really didn't care anymore, and in addition Borlaug was then still alive so I knew I would have to contend with him. And so I said to the guy who called me up, "Well, do you know who invented the computer," and he said, "No." And I said, "Well, I'll do that one." I mean, I really couldn't believe they would put Norman Borlaug in, but not Atanasoff, so that's what got me started on it. And since I had been at Iowa State for a long time, and since the father of my two daughters had written an article for the Iowa State Historical Magazine about Atanasoff I was familiar with the story. But my goal was not to say, "Okay, this is the first guy," and there are tons and tons of books out there all of which say, "No. My guy is first. No. My guy is first." But as I kept going on my research I realized that it was much more interesting not who was first, but how the stories wove together, and also how the personalities of the inventors compared and contrasted to one another. And eventually I had about eight characters, and there were two characters with a capital C. They were a novelist's dream, I have to say, and I really enjoyed that. CHM Ref: X Computer History Museum Page 1 of 24

2 Hollar: Did you expect that going into it? Did you know that you were dealing with these kind of huge personalities? Smiley: Well, I knew that Atanasoff had been extremely dynamic and energetic, and so I knew that he had a big personality of a certain kind of maybe classic American go getter, do it yourself sort of thing. But I wasn't familiar with the other characters at all, and they were not only entirely different from one another, but also extremely distinct in the way that they went about things, and the circumstances that they had to put up with. And so I loved comparing and contrasting how they went about things and what they had to deal with. I finally said that the story was like four separate movies running simultaneously in four different movie theaters, and they were all different styles of movie. And obviously the English movie about the Colossus was this kind of war movie, but that fascinated me, too. Hollar: I want to talk about that, and the way that you've interwoven these stories together. Let me ask you just, though, before I do that, can you talk a little bit about the challenges of a non-technical writer writing about a very technical subject? Smiley: Well, it's sort of like horseback riding. If you start early enough then you master it and you don't forget it, but if you wait until you're in your late 50s the details come and go, and that's why you need tech support. I mean, I did know what binary computation was, and I won't go any further than that. But I knew that because of eighth grade math not because I learned it afresh. So the technical part was difficult, but that's why I got John and Bob to help me, and I knew that I was going to need that. Hollar: And then you dove right in. Smiley: I dove right in, yeah. The best way to write a book, any kind of book, is just to write, and to know that whatever mistakes you're making at any given point you can come back and correct those. The book does not have to leave the house before you let it out. So you can move forward not necessarily with confidence, but with a kind of impetus even though you know that you're making mistakes. And then somebody comes along and corrects them, either your editor or you at a later date, or whatever. Hollar: Who picked the title? Smiley: The publisher. Hollar: The publisher picked the title. And did you know, I mean, controversy never hurts when it comes to selling a book, and certainly The Man Who Invented the Computer is a controversial title to put out there. Did you know when that title was being picked, and this is the way the book was going to go out, that it was going to be controversial? CHM Ref: X Computer History Museum Page 2 of 24

3 Smiley: I knew the whole book was going to be controversial no matter what the title was. I mean, I could have entitled it Maybe This Guy Invented the Computer, and a lot of people would have objected to every word in that title. There is just no way to avoid it. So I tried to address the issues of the controversy, and I tried to pose my question, which is not who is the guy who invented the first computer, but how did my computer, which at that time was a MacBook, how did this computer get to me. But I still get s from people who say, "But he didn't invent the first computer," and obviously this is a person who has not read the book and doesn't know that that wasn't the question that I posed. Hollar: And that is how you open the book. It says you first began this journey by simply asking, "How did this thing on my desk, get to my desk." So let's talk about Atanasoff the man. Smiley: It's an 11-inch MacBook Air now, though. Hollar: An 11-inch MacBook Air for the Apple fansters out there. Let's talk about Atanasoff the man. Smiley: Okay. Hollar: So clearly eccentric, brilliant, driven, not widely known in American history. What was it about Atanasoff once you got into this that you found so fascinating as a subject of a book like this? Smiley: Well, one of the things is-- one of the things I looked into was theories of creativity, and one of the people that I-- one of the books that I read defined a creative person as a problem seeker. And when you read about Atanasoff's early life he was the kind of kid who would fix something, but then he would go on to improve that thing, so to improve maybe the design of that thing, whatever it was. So it wasn't good enough for him just to bring it back to the way that it was left at the factory, or something, he wanted to fix it. So instead of a problem solver he was a problem seeker and that seems to be the way his mind works, and that's the way a creative person's mind works. It looks at the whole system of whatever the problem is, and it organizes that system, and then it asks questions of that system that caused that system to sort of reveal itself, and then maybe to be improved by the problem seeker. And obviously, as a novelist, I'm aware of that way of thinking. A novelist is a person who has never met a novel he didn't think he could make better. A painter goes to a patining, goes stands in front of a beautiful painting and says, "Oh, shit. I'll never do that well." A novelist reads War and Peace and says, "You know what he really should have done." And so there's that quality that I was familiar with of this is pretty good, whatever it is, War and Peace, Anna Karenina, and King Lear, but let's just tweak it a little bit to make it say slightly different things. So I recognized that in Atanasoff. Hollar: I think you just made this amazing connection between writing a novel and being an engineer. CHM Ref: X Computer History Museum Page 3 of 24

4 Smiley: Well, there's a lot of engineering in novel writing, not so much in poetry writing, but in novel writing, yeah. Hollar: So here's a guy who is a problem seeker, and the problem that he has involves his studies in quantum physics. He's trying to do this incredibly complicated work solving all of this by hand, frustrated; just can't deal with that complexity anymore. Smiley: And also he was a teacher. I think that's an important aspect, because he was by profession seeking problems and ways to solve them for his students. And so because he had students he was constantly having to explain what to do, how to do it, how it might work, and so his mind was constantly working in that way because of being a teacher, too. So one of the things he did at Iowa State all though the early part of the '30s was kind of deploy his students to think about things, and I think that was an important part of how he got organized, how he organized his mind to grasp the problem and then have it come to him. Hollar: And he saw his students struggling with the same thing he was struggling with. Smiley: Absolutely. Absolutely. Hollar: He even says at one point, "The last thing I wanted to do was invent something." Smiley: Absolutely. Hollar: He really didn't seek to invent the device. Smiley: Yes. That really struck me. It was like a tragic moment in his life. I have to do this thing, and I don't want to do it. I'm interested in other things. And I also think it was really-- we have to remember that in 1937 in Ames, Iowa there was no sense that the ideas that he needed, or that the invention of a computer would be a fruitful thing. He didn't necessarily know that he could invent it, and he didn't necessarily know that it would work, and he didn't necessarily know that it would contribute to his academic career. And so he knew there was a really strong chance that he was just heading down a dead end, and that it wasn't a dead end is a tribute to his brilliance. But we all quail when we see that there must be something done that we weren't thinking we had to do, but we have to do it and it's a huge project. Hollar: And as it turns out, as you describe him, he's also someone who would undertake a project, and finish it, and then move on. It's as if... CHM Ref: X Computer History Museum Page 4 of 24

5 Smiley: That seems to be the case, yeah. Hollar: He wasn't interested, necessarily, in this, anything that he invented, because this wasn't the only thing that he designed in his life. Smiley: Well, two things struck me about him as a creative person. One was that it was the problem itself that fascinated him, and the other one was his inherent frugality. I mean, John Vincent Junior is here, and one of the stories, and you can correct me if this is wrong, but as I remember one of the stories was that when you were a baby you lived in the basement of the family home that John Vincent Senior was building all through an Ames, Iowa winter. So that's how his mind worked. Let's do things one-step at a time. If the baby has to live in the basement while we're building the house, well, the baby has to live in the basement. If we have to build the breadboard computer, which is this big, in order to understand how it works, and then make the next step to the differential equation solver, which is this big in order to understand what it works, and then maybe the next step is to the one that's as big as the poster there, then that's how his mind worked. Step-by-step let's be as frugal in every way as we can, and let's master this thing before we go onto the next thing. Hollar: And he finally decides that invention is ultimately the only solution here. Smiley: Yeah. Hollar: He finds Berry. Smiley: Well, you know, I had to laugh when I was reading, because he did fiddle with an IBM calculator, and he did improve it, and it made the IBMers really mad, and he found this out later. So they were very proprietary about their equipment, and they shouldn't have been. They should have called him up and said, "Come on, we'll hire you." And that's the difference between their way of doing things and his way of doing things. He brought Berry in and said, "Blah, blah, blah, blah. Blah, blah, blah, blah," and I'm sure Berry said, "Oh, we could do that," and they were able to collaborate very fruitfully, but that's because they weren't feeling proprietorial about the thing they were doing. They were just interested in it. Hollar: So let's leave them for a moment. This is about 1939 or so. Smiley: Yeah. CHM Ref: X Computer History Museum Page 5 of 24

6 Hollar: And let's turn to the other figures that you cover, because you really do, do a romp through history of all these incredible people who were more or less working on the same thing at exactly the same moment. Smiley: Well, you know, when I started out I decided that maybe personality wise if Atanasoff was over here in the kind of hyperdynamic, hyper-masculine world, we have Alan Turing over here. They were quite opposite, and where Atanasoff was fixing the family automobile when he was, I believe it was 13 or 12, Turing couldn't tie his shoes or even get them on the right feet by the time he was five or six. So here were two guys both essential to the history of computing whose minds worked in completely different ways. And it wasn't that Turing had no engineering in his background. His mother's family was full of engineers. But what I finally decided was that the poor little boy every time he lifted a tool somebody took it out of his hand and said, "That's not worthy of you." They sent him to the Sherborne School, which is also where Evelyn Waugh and Alec Waugh, and those people who were born at the same time, so I was familiar with the Sherborne School. It was a very strict school, and Turing was terribly teased. He was put under the floorboards of the dormitory at least once a year by the other children. He would try to build something and stick it on the windowsill, and it would get thrown away. I mean, it was really a sad thing, because he clearly had the desire to make stuff, but because he was educated in a certain way he wasn't allowed to make stuff. And here was Atanasoff in the middle of Florida required to make stuff in order to survive. So I thought they were quite an interesting contrast. Hollar: Well, and after you introduced us to Atanasoff in the beginning of the book, Turing is the very first figure that you talk about. Is it because of that duality? Smiley: Yeah, it's because they're in such contrast to one another. But then the third person in the troika is clearly Konrad Zuse, who is the only one who wrote his own autobiography, and it's quite interesting to read, and I recommend it. You can still find it around. And Zuse's earliest memories weren't of either making things or thinking things, they were of perceiving things. And his mind seems to have worked sort of around patterns and design. And he did become an inventor, but he became an inventor because he liked the idea of sort of the way things worked. But he's truly an oddball too. I mean, here is a person who is doing his computer all through the 1930s, late 1930s into the 1940s, and bombs are dropping all around him, and the big thing he's worried about is whether the computer is going to work when it's demonstrated, you know? Hollar: And he's foraging for parts. Smiley: Yes. Yes. Hollar: In the ruins of the bombed out areas of his... CHM Ref: X Computer History Museum Page 6 of 24

7 Smiley: Well, not only is he foraging for parts, but he's foraging for people to help him. Hollar: Right. Smiley: And the only people that are available are women, misfits and criminals, and so he makes good use of both, you know? One of his programmers was blind, and that's when Zuse realized that braille was a form of code, so he put him to good use. One day after there had been a bombing Zuse needed some, I think it was some, I think it was a piece of copper wire, or a length of copper wire, so he sent a couple of his helpers out into the street to where the street car line had been bombed, and they clipped a piece and came running back. The great thing about Zuse is he has a wonderful sense of humor, and you're reading this book, and you just cannot believe that you're laughing at the things that are happening. But it's because he sees them in such a sort of amazed way. And I think the thing that, probably the incident that is the most dramatic, there's a couple of them, but one time the computer, I think it's the Z4, is in the basement of a building in Berlin, and he's going to work at it. And as he's running up the stairs or, excuse me, running down the stairs, he hears an incoming bomb, and he steps to one side. The bomb hits the staircase, blows it up, and then he realizes that that's all over, so he continues on down to the computer. He's much more interested in whether the computer is going to work than whether he's going to die. But maybe the most dramatic thing was when they realized they had to get the computer out of Berlin. Berlin was falling, and the Reich was collapsing, and it was in a basement. And they managed to get it on the elevator, but the elevator had no power, and the way that you would get the elevator up you had to pull on a lever that just turned the pulley that got the elevator out of the basement. They had to pull on it just one half or a quarter of a turn at a time. And they did get it out, and they had a truck, and Zuse had sort of a fairy godfather. He didn't know where he came from, but he managed to get them a truck, and they managed to get the Z4 into the truck. And then every time they came to a checkpoint this man would say that they had the V4 in there. And everybody knew what the V4 was, or thought they knew what the V4 was, and so because they had the V4 in there they let them through, and they managed to get to Southern Germany and then to Austria and save the Z4. Hollar: The Z4. So you've go Zuse, and you've got Atanasoff. Let's turn back to Turing and the team at Bletchley Park, because that thread is one that runs very much in parallel with these other stories, and you bring Newman, and you bring Tommy Flowers in the whole group into the forefront at that point. Smiley: I think everybody's heard of Turing. He's the most famous. Probably the least famous is Tommy Flowers, and Flowers did say that the Colossus would never have been built without him, and I think for several reasons, but the one specific reason was that Tommy Flowers worked for the British Telephone Company before the war, and in September of 1939 he had done an experiment using vacuum tubes to see if they could use vacuum tubes to transmit the telephone signal more quickly, and it had worked, and it had been his idea. And he went to Germany, and when the Germans attacked Poland, and the British declared war he was in Germany, and he managed to get out with two hours to spare. As soon as he realized that they were at war he headed for the border, and he managed to get out with two hours to CHM Ref: X Computer History Museum Page 7 of 24

8 spare. And he said if he had not managed to get out nobody back in England knew enough about vacuum tubes to build the Colossus. There's a wonderful book, actually, that's really worth reading. It's called Colossus for those of you who haven't read it. It came out in And in the war Turing and the others who worked on code breaking for the Enigma, that was really essential early in the war because that broke Naval codes, and if they hadn't been able to break the Naval codes Britain would have been cut off and been without food and resources, but they did manage to break the Naval codes. The Tunny codes, or the codes that were put out by the Lorenz-Schlüsselzusatz were the Army codes, and they were the High Command codes. And so as the allies got their act together and converged, and made up their minds that they were going to invade, they had to be breaking those Army codes, and they were much more complicated codes. I think the moment in the book that always brings a tear to my eye is actually that in early June of 1944 everybody was getting ready for the Normandy Invasion, and Eisenhower was sitting with his High Command. They had rain. Bad weather had stalled them for a few days. They had intended to go on the first. And someone ran in, and they had the first code that the Colossus had broken. And what it said was that the Germans had decided that the push toward Normandy was a faint, and that really the allies were going to the south. And so they should not-- Rommel, I believe it was, decided this, and then the German forces were ordered to stay to the south rather than to move toward Normandy. And was that the key moment in the history of The Second World War? Well, there were a lot of key moments, but that was certainly an important one, and that was Colossus. Hollar: That was Colossus. Smiley: And that was the first code that was broken. Hollar: On the stage now you've got Turing, and Flowers, and Newman. You've got Zuse. There are some others who have to enter the frame, Eckert and Mauchly and von Neumann, but before we bring them in, let's talk about the work that had to go on with the ABC and what actually happened to bring that machine to life. So Atanasoff has this very eager young graduate student, Clifford Berry. They raise $650 in grant money through the University. Smiley: That was a lot for Iowa State. Hollar: Which was, spoken like a true University of Iowa alum, and so they set out to build the machine. Smiley: First they took-- how many vacuum tubes were on the breadboard, John? Gustafson: There were seven dual-triodes, seven dual-triodes. CHM Ref: X Computer History Museum Page 8 of 24

9 Smiley: Say that again. Gustafson: Seven dual-triodes. Smiley: Seven, okay. So first they got a little board that's out there, and they just tried it to see if it was going to work. And they had that built by the fall of '38, I believe. Is that right, or '39, the fall of '39? Hollar: It's '39, yeah. Smiley: And it worked like a charm. And so Clifford Berry was from Gladbrook, which was a little cattycorner northeast of Ames, and he was an extremely calm and congenial person who had been an Eagle Scout not too long before he was building the computer. But his father had been killed by a disgruntled worker, and his mother, even though the father was killed the mother put together the money to send Berry to Iowa State. And Berry's job was to build the thing, and also, I think, was to sort of understand what Atanasoff was getting at, and to put it together. I think they consulted a lot, but I think Berry did a lot sort of thinking on his own. And so he got the angle iron and he built, as you can see out there, he built what looks like a desk. And they had that together by '40, I think they had it together by the fall of 1940, but they were still fiddling with it and working with it. The sad thing was that when Atanasoff was looking for a space to build it they sent him to the basement of the physics building, which was good in some ways because it was a constant temperature and rather cool, but it was bad in other ways because it was just a kind of a little basement. At the time when they built it there were no rooms there, and subsequently rooms were built, and the doorways of the room was smaller than the computer, smaller than the ABC. Hollar: And that's how it happened. Smiley: Yeah, this is life at Iowa State. I mean, I love Iowa State. I'll tell an Iowa State story. When I first got to Iowa State I was pregnant with my second child, and sometime in September when I was probably nine months along I walked across the campus to go to the main building to do something in the office. And I got there at about ten minutes to twelve, closed up tight. I looked at my watch. I said, "Boy, it's not even noon yet," and I pounded on the door. No answer. I pounded on the door. No answer. Finally I had pounded a long time, and the door to the office opened. It opened like this, and one of the secretaries peeked out at me. And I said, "I need to do blah, blah, blah," and she said, "The office is closed." And I said, "Well, it's not even noon yet," and she said, "This is Iowa State. We do things differently here." So the office was closed for lunch between ten of twelve and one-ten. You know, I said, "I'm nine months pregnant. I'm coming in," and I opened the door. That's part of the reason I wrote Moo, because Iowa State had these wonderful sort of peculiarities and eccentricities, and that's Iowa State. CHM Ref: X Computer History Museum Page 9 of 24

10 Hollar: So these eccentrics, inventors prove out their concept. They build this device. It's December 1940, and... Smiley: Yes, and one of the things that they did, when Atanasoff went east one of the things he did was look up every place he could think of where there might be information about copyrighting things that were built. Hollar: And they're documenting this very carefully as they're building it. Smiley: They're documenting it. They wrote a description of it that was 35 pages long. He is going, I think he went to the place where I can't remember the name of it now, the Patent Office to check and see if anything was being patented. Nothing was being patented. He could not find a single thing that was like this. And I think he was a little amazed, but also thrilled. He probably had many different conflicting feelings about this. Hollar: And he goes to a conference in December of 1940 in Philadelphia, and he goes to a lecture. There's a bright young engineer giving a lecture in the same area, John Mauchly. He hears Mauchly talk about his ideas, very similar in the way of design and sort of the theory that Mauchly is working on in his work. They meet at the end of the conference. Smiley: Well, he runs up afterwords and describes what he's got. Hollar: And he runs up and says to Mauchly. He's very excited, because suddenly he feels like he's hearing someone who's got a very similar set of ideas, and he wants to talk to Mauchly about it, and they begin to exchange ideas. Can you take it from there? Smiley: Well, they talked about it then, and Mauchly asked if he could come and see the ABC, and Atanasoff said yes. And so... Hollar: And so Mauchly drives from... Smiley: So in June he drove bringing his son to Ames, and he was there, I think, for five days. I think that's how long he was there. And he talked to Berry. He talked to Atanasoff. He read the 35-page document. He asked if he could take the 35-page document back with him. And Lura, Atanasoff's wife was a little suspicious of how much John was telling him. She's an interesting figure too, because according to some sources Mauchly didn't say he was bringing a child, and he just showed up with his son, and handed him over to Lura, who had plenty of children of her own. CHM Ref: X Computer History Museum Page 10 of 24

11 Hollar: I think that child could have been here tonight. Smiley: He could have been, yeah. And I think she was more cautious. I think that Atanasoff was so thrilled that finally somebody saw the possibilities of his idea that he was quite open about everything, and I think Lura was a little more cautious. And she also noticed that Mauchly was staying up at night and apparently reading the 35-page description and all of that. And so when Mauchly left Lura, you know, she cautioned Atanasoff and said, "You know, maybe you should just button your lip a little bit," but he hadn't, and... Hollar: And he didn't let Mauchly take the copy of the documentation. Smiley: He didn't let him take the 35-page-- he had five copies of the 35-page description, and he didn't allow Mauchly to take the one with him. Hollar: So Mauchly goes back to Philadelphia, 1942 Atanasoff goes east to work at the Naval Ordinance Laboratory. He leave Iowa State having been assured by the University that they would seek a patent on the ABC, and trusting that that patent application was going to be filed, and that would all occur he goes off to work in the war effort. Smiley: Yes. Hollar: He and Mauchly meet again. Smiley: Yes. Mauchly showed up at the Naval Ordinance Lab several times, chatted. I gather that part of Mauchly's personality was that he was quite sociable, and talkative, and enthusiastic, and easy to get along with and talk to, and the sort of person who you want to talk to. And so I think that Atanasoff was busy, and he was glad to see him, and Mauchly would ask him this or that question about his ideas about computing, and. Hollar: And so meanwhile at the Moore School here's Mauchly and Eckert eventually joined by John von Neumann. Smiley: I think this is an interesting thing. When Mauchly returned from Ames he went to a summer program at the Moore School that was about computing, and Eckert was there, and they connected then. And then they began to put together their ideas, and they wrote up a description. You know, this part I'm a little-- I can see it on the page, but I can't quite remember. But they wrote up one description. Nobody was interested. The description got thrown away. And then there was this problem of calculating firing CHM Ref: X Computer History Museum Page 11 of 24

12 tables, you know, at what angle do you raise the weapon in order to hit the target. And there were scads, and scads, and scads, and scads of mathematically minded young women who were calculating these by hand. Hollar: Human computers. Smiley: Yeah. And they realized that they could build this, and they were building it partly on a computer idea that had already been-- that was already at the Moore School, but that person had left to go to the Army. And so they concocted another description of what they could do, and this time they got funding for it. And the person that was put in charge of them, the Army person that was put in charge of them was Herman Goldstine, who was a mathematician in the Army. And Goldstine was standing on a platform, I think it was in Philadelphia, on a subway platform, a train platform, I guess, and he saw John von Neumann across the platform, and he knew what a great mathematician von Neumann was, and he went up and introduced himself. And, you know, von Neumann just sort of was about to brush him off when Goldstine said he was working on a computer project. And immediately von Neumann, who was at this point involved in the calculations for dropping the bombs in Japan, calculations of how high off the ground the bombs would have to explode in order to do maximum damage, and he knew how difficult these calculations were, and all the calculations surrounding the development of the atom bomb had been very difficult. So he was quite interested in this idea of the computer. And so Goldstine brought von Neumann in to show him ENIAC, and von Neumann came back and forth fairly often. And von Neumann was quite brilliant. He also couldn't screw in a light bulb, according to his wife, although he could fix a zipper. But he had a wonderful grasp of, even if he couldn't fix anything, he had a wonderful grasp of how things meshed and what they meant. And the biographer that I read of von Neumann said that the characteristic of his mind, apart from sociability, was that he could systematize and see the importance of a thing that the people who were working on that thing didn't quite understand. So he saw ENIAC and said, "Oh." Hollar: And understood the importance of it. Smiley: And understood, yeah. Hollar: And the potential. Smiley: Yeah. Hollar: I want to go back for a minute to-- there were repeated visits between Mauchly and Atanasoff where Mauchly would make his way from Philadelphia to Washington to meet with Atanasoff, and you described those at some length in the book. And I don't want to talk about the visits as much as how CHM Ref: X Computer History Museum Page 12 of 24

13 carefully documented were all these interactions between Mauchly and Atanasoff, and where did the record of these visits, and all of this interaction between them, get put down? Smiley: Well, Mauchly's visit to Ames is pretty well documented, because a lot of people saw him doing things with hands on the computer and all of that. I believe it was just Atanasoff who said Mauchly came to visit, Mauchly came to visit, Mauchly came to visit. Whether he remembered exactly how many times I don't know. Hollar: But it was Atanasoff's recollection. Smiley: Yeah, and he also remembered... Hollar: And did that come out of the court documents? Is that primarily the way that Atanasoff's account of all of these visits was made public? Smiley: Well, I used both Tamara Burton's book, who's Atanasoff's granddaughter, and Mollen and Scott... Hollar: Mollehoff, yeah. Smiley: Yeah, what's his first name? Male: Clark. Smiley: Clark, Clark Mollenhoff's book, and Mullenhoff had a lot of interviews with Atanasoff. And there was one time when Eckert came to visit too. And according to Tamara Burton's book there was one time when von Neumann came to visit too, that he came and chatted up Atanasoff, too, about the computer. Hollar: So let's skip ahead just a bit. We will know the ENIAC existed. We'll know that the UNIVAC, the Eckert and Mauchly company was founded by Eckert and Mauchly, and the UNIVAC came into the market, and ultimately became part of Sperry Rand, and so now we're in the late 1950s, and the patent litigation begins, because now suddenly Sperry Rand is going to being asserting these rights to the patents that Eckert and Mauchly had received on electronic computing. Smiley: Well, the first people to approach Atanasoff, and ask him about his projects, his project at Iowa State, were from IBM. The man was a man named A.J. Etienne, and he approach Atanasoff and then CHM Ref: X Computer History Museum Page 13 of 24

14 disappeared, and that seemed to be because IBM decided the best way to go was just to buy into the rights for ENIAC. So that was the first little indication, I think, for Atanasoff that something was going on. He was asked to come and visit and look at ENIAC at the end of the war, and he looked at it, and it was so hugely different from the ABC. And Mauchly had kept saying to him when he would meet up with him, "Well, what we're doing is not at all like what you did." And when he saw ENIAC he said, "Oh, he must be telling me the truth. It doesn't look anything like what I did." So I think that he put it out of his mind. He was a successful businessman. He was onto new projects, and I think when Etienne showed up he thought something was up, but then Etienne disappeared, and that was that. But that was the first little flutter of something going on. Now, part of the reason that things got going with the breaking of the patent had to do not with Atanasoff, but with Berry, and I can't remember the name of the person. There was a man who was writing about this history of the computer. He was writing a book about the history of the computer. He happened to be in Ames, and one of his neighbors happened to have seen the ABC and known Berry. And this man, who was writing the computer book, investigated this, and he discussed it with Berry, and he decided that there had been this predecessor to ENIAC. So it was actually through Clifford Berry that the first sort of entry into the culture of what the importance was the ABC's... Hollar: And it became apparent then to everyone involved that there was a conflict potentially. Smiley: Well, yeah. Hollar: And so the patent litigation begins, and it... Smiley: To me, von Neumann was an interesting person, and he, to me, is a pivotal character here, because when it came time to describe ENIAC, and prepare to go onto the next step, von Neumann and Herman Goldstine wrote up a lengthy description of what they had done, what everybody had done, not just them, but what everybody had done. And Herman Goldstine wrote it and rewrote it, and von Neumann put his name on it. And they passed out and sent around at least two or three hundred copies. Hollar: That paper circulated very widely. Smiley: In Europe and in America. And so when Mauchly and Eckert decided a little bit later than that, you know, they questioned the description and Goldstine said, "Oh, it's just an internal document so that we know what we're doing." And then when Eckert and Mauchly sort of woke up and said, "Oh, boy, we've got to get our own document together," they put together a description of what they had been doing on ENIAC, and what their ideas were. And Herman Goldstine, since he was still the boss, and it was still wartime, stamped it top secret. So the following spring when Eckert and Mauchly were ready to leave, and to go invent their machine and begin a business around it, von Neumann brought a patent lawyer with him to the meeting, and the patent lawyer said, "Well, you know, because the von Neumann description was so widely circulated those ideas in that description aren't really patentable." And von CHM Ref: X Computer History Museum Page 14 of 24

15 Neumann, according to his biographer, went, "Oh, dear." Well, obviously, someone like von Neumann knew exactly what he was doing. And my view is that von Neumann was, in many ways, and this is just inference on my part, but because he worked on the atom bomb, because he knew that it was all government financed, because he was from a certain sort of collective kind of mathematical culture, he didn't think anybody should own the ideas. You wouldn't own the ideas of the atom bomb, why would you own the ideas of the computer? If they were equally important to the future of the world then you can't own that. This is how I'm inferring that he thought. And so I think he put one over on Eckert and Mauchly with the collaboration or the collusion of Herman Goldstine. Hollar: And yet they do receive patents. Smiley: Yeah. They did write up their patents for ENIAC, and they did eventually receive the patents, and they did then build UNIVAC. Hollar: And it's clear as electronic computing takes hold, and Honeywell, and Control Data, and these other companies are now really beginning to make a market in electronic computing, Sperry Rand begins to assert these Eckert and Mauchly patents against the field. Smiley: I have to say one of the details I loved the most about the Eckert and Mauchly saga was that their first investor was the American Totalizer Company who always at the forefront, the horseracing, the betting people, they were the first ones who saw the possibilities, and so that was one of their first investors. Hollar: So we're now at the point where this patent is being challenged. All of these patents are being challenged. This begins in The patent litigation goes on and on. Atanasoff is not involved initially. Smiley: No. Hollar: And seven years into the litigation a body is found in a hotel room, and it turns out to be Clifford Berry. Smiley: It's not a hotel room, though. It was kind of a lodging, an outbuilding, not really a real hotel room. Hollar: And the circumstances of Clifford Berry's death, as it's being investigated, are not clear at all. Smiley: No, and there are a lot of ways to look at it. He was found with a plastic bag over his face, and he had died by suffocation. His wife went to various doctors and said, "Is this possible that he could have CHM Ref: X Computer History Museum Page 15 of 24

16 killed himself by just putting a plastic bag over his face," and they said, "No." On the other hand, and she would have said also that he was moving. He was getting a new job. It was a great new job. They were looking at houses. He was enthusiastic about the job, and eager to get on with their lives on the East Coast. He'd been working in Pasadena. And so she believed, really, until the end of her life that it was not suicide. On the other hand, he had been in a car accident and he was having a certain amount of pain. So I, just in my book, I just leave that up in the air. I don't know the answer to that question. I don't think it's possible to know, at this point. But it galvanized Atanasoff. Hollar: I was going to say, at that point you suggest this was the thing, this was the sort of catalyst that gets Atanasoff involved in the litigation. Smiley: Well, you have to see it from Atanasoff's point of view. He's got lots of projects. He's always a forward thinking person. He must have been about my age at this point, a little bit older, and he had moved a lot of times, and you've got to get all those papers out again, and you've got to go through them, and where are they, and are they in the garage? Are the in the attic? Are they in the basement? And so he needed something in order to get him moving on exactly how to go about finding the old papers, and getting back to the ABC, and learning about the new computers, and sorting the ideas about what he made and what is now in existence. Hollar: And true to form it turns out he was meticulous. Smiley: Absolutely. Hollar: In keeping notes, and papers, and documenting all this work that had been done over 20 years earlier at this point. Smiley: Yeah, more, 25, yeah. He had the papers, and they made sense. He had been meticulous about how we wrote them out. And he was also lucky in that there were people at Iowa State, still at Iowa State who remembered the circumstances, remembered seeing Mauchly come and visit. He was also lucky in the sense that Mauchly didn't know that Atanasoff was working for "the other side," the non- Sperry side. And so Mauchly called him up and said, "Can I come and talk to you and bring my lawyer?" And Atanasoff said yes, and he and Alice, his wife, hosted Mauchly and the lawyer. And Mauchly was much too forthcoming. He told Atanasoff and Alice what he thought. He told him what his lawyers had told him to say, and what they told him to do, and how they told him to talk about it, and basically they told him to be as forgetful as possible. At least that's what he told Atanasoff. Hollar: And to be fair, Mauchly was not a well man at this point. CHM Ref: X Computer History Museum Page 16 of 24

17 Smiley: No. No. Hollar: He did have a physical and sort of mental condition that made it not probably as possible for him to have those moments of total recall that Atanasoff is said to have had during 11 days on the stand. Smiley: No, but he also didn't have the paperwork to remind him of what he had been thinking, or how he had been thinking. Hollar: And, by the way, by this time Atanasoff had discovered that Iowa State never filed a patent application. Smiley: Yes. Hollar: So this was the only patent, but that doesn't seem, in your view, to really have driven him. It's not like Atanasoff was crusading to destroy these patents because he... Smiley: No, no. I don't think he was going to profit. He wasn't going to profit. What drove him to do this? I think he wanted to get it right. He wanted things to be orderly and right, and he wanted to get it on the record, and the stuff that he had done and Berry had done. I think he wanted that on the record, and he knew how to get it on the record. Hollar: And so he testifies for... Smiley: Let me also say that the lawyers Atanasoff was working with were much more organized, and methodical, and careful than the Sperry lawyers. One of the lawyers was Charles Call who was 28 years old, and he was really good at not only getting the depositions, but also videotaping testimony, also putting everything on computers so that you could get to it very quickly instead of having it in books, or having it in files. So the lawyers that were working on the Honeywell side they were more competent, and they also had more to work with, and they worked well that Atanasoff. Atanasoff basically tested them, "Do you really know what you're doing," and they won him over, and so then he became quite enthusiastic. Hollar: So he testifies for 11 days, right? Smiley: I think that the lawyers on the Sperry side were saying to themselves, "How often does a patent in America get thrown out?" CHM Ref: X Computer History Museum Page 17 of 24

18 Hollar: You think? Smiley: I think that was in the back of their minds. Hollar: So they felt they were going to defend this patent, and that wasn't going to... Smiley: They felt they were in the dominant position, I think. Hollar: So Atanasoff turns out to be a pretty remarkable witness. Smiley: Uh-huh, really remarkable. He's practically a photographic memory with the documentation to back it up. Hollar: Testifies for 11 days, and then in 1972, on the same day as the... Smiley: October 17th, I think it was, but it was '73. Hollar: Seventy-three, I'm sorry. The court rules that the patents are invalid. Smiley: Yes, on the same day as the break-in, the Watergate. Hollar: So the decision was released, and Sirica released his... Smiley: Yeah, Sirica's decision in the Watergate break-in. Hollar: That's right, yeah. Smiley: But who knows that the patent really, come on, is this computer patent going to hit the big time newspaper wise even if Nixon isn't going down? I don't think so. I think it was a very, very important decision for the industry, but I think in 1973 nobody really knew where the industry was going. It was not that terribly newsworthy. Hollar: And what happens to Atanasoff? CHM Ref: X Computer History Museum Page 18 of 24

19 Smiley: Nothing. The case is won, but he doesn't make any money, and he doesn't really gain any fame. People learn about it, and are interested in it, but the exhibitions like at the Smithsonian still don't include him. Hollar: There is a new exhibition that does include him, by the way. Smiley: Yeah, but these are the old exhibitions. Hollar: And it has been called by USA Today, "The Valley's Answer to the Smithsonian," so. Smiley: I have to say that when I was doing the research, and I say this right at the beginning of the book, and I went on the MIT inventor's website, he wasn't on the inventor's website. And some woman who invented the hand cycle, I don't even know what a hand cycle is, she's there. So I do think that he got a lot of recognition as he got older including a Presidential Medal, but until he's conquered the MIT website he's just-- he hasn't really gotten there. Hollar: So what is your conclusion about Atanasoff the man? You looked at the arc of his entire life now, and... Smiley: I'm glad he wasn't my dad. He would have been really mad at me because I couldn't understand Algebra at all. No, I think he was an incredibly dynamic, interesting and inventive person. One of the great stories, Lura, his first wife, was a wonderful gardener, and on the property they had a big garden, and there were a lot of peas. And Atanasoff wanted to come up with a method for shelling peas. And so he used the dryer, shelling peas through centrifugal force. And that's the way his mind worked. Here's a problem, "Oh, I can figure that out." To me that's a fascinating thing, and he had that. We all know people like that, but he had that to an absolutely unusual degree. Hollar: Did you ever get a sense in researching this that he was the least bit wistful? Smiley: Oh sure. Hollar: That that patent had never been filed, and maybe he thought to himself, "I might have been the guy who was gaining commercial fame, and making this money, and..." Smiley: John Junior and Tamara can correct me, but I didn't get the feeling that he was motivated by money. I just got the feeling that he was motivated by inquisitiveness. CHM Ref: X Computer History Museum Page 19 of 24

20 Hollar: And solving the problem. Smiley: And solving the problem, and that's one of his really admirable characteristics. But his life had a happy ending, because he made money doing other things. So in some sense in my four theaters the Atanasoff movie is the one with the happy ending. The Zuse movie is the weird one, but also with a happy ending. But the other two movies don't have a happy ending. The Turing movie doesn't have a happy ending. The Flowers movie doesn't have a happy ending. The von Neumann movie doesn't have a happy ending. He died young at 56 probably of cancer induced by his work on the atomic bomb. So we all want to be in the movie that has the happy ending. Hollar: We have some great questions here. We're going to take a few questions and then you're going to do a reading. Is the thesis that John von Neumann wanted computers in the public, as you talked about the distribution of this paper that was written at the Moore School, is that new to your book? Is that a new theory? Smiley: I don't know, because I didn't see it in the books that I was reading about von Neumann. I inferred it from what I read, but I'm not going to lay claim to absolute originality, but that's what I inferred, yeah. Hollar: What was your biggest surprise, or the lesson you learned? Those are two very different questions, so maybe you can talk about the lesson you learned and your biggest surprise in working on this. Smiley: The lesson I learned was go back to fiction. Hollar: Really? Say more about that. Why is that? Smiley: No. The biggest surprise was how interesting all these characters were, and how even somebody like Tommy Flowers, about whom there is almost nothing, you could still see his personality shinning through. Three pages at the most, three or four pages of material about Tommy Flowers. Well, a little more than that. But just the things he says about himself. In The Land of the Blind he's the oneeyed man. So that was the greatest thing was how totally idiosyncratic and interesting they all were. Hollar: I think we have a lot of budding writers in the audience tonight, because these are a lot about the craft of writing, the way you wrote this book. Smiley: Okay, we can have a couple of those. CHM Ref: X Computer History Museum Page 20 of 24