ty. During the late ‘30’s, Atanasoff had spent time trying to build an electronic calculating device to help his students solve complicated math problems. One night, the idea came to him for linking the computer memory and the associated logic. Later, he and an associate, Clifford Berry, succeeded in building the “ABC," for Atanasoff-Berry Computer. After Mauchly met with Atanasoff and Berry, he used the ABC as the basis for the next computer development. From this association ultimately would come a lawsuit, considering attempts to get patents for a commercial version of the machine that Mauchly built. The suit was finally decided in 1974, when it was decided that Atanasoff had been the true developer of the ideas required to make an electronic digital computer actually work, although some computer historians dispute this decision. But during the war years, Mauchly and Eckert were able to use the ABC principals in dramatic effect to create the ENIAC. Computers Become More Powerful The size of ENIAC's numerical "word" was 10 decimal digits, and it could multiply two of these numbers at a rate of 300 per second, by finding the value of each product from a Multiplication table stored in its memory. ENIAC was about 1000 times faster than the previous generation of computers. ENIAC used 18,000 vacuum tubes, about 1,800 square feet of floor space, and consumed about 180,000 watts of electrical power. It had punched card input, 1 multiplier, 1 divider/square rooter, and 20 adders using decimal ring counters, which served as adders and also as quick-access (.0002 seconds) read-write register storage. The executable instructions making up a program were embodied in the separate "units" of ENIAC, which were plugged together to form a "route" for the flow of...
