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This review gives the impression that Dyson's book doesn't give credit for the Williams tube. It does. (The linked article in the Atlantic is guilty, though.)

This review gives the impression that Dyson's book doesn't give credit for the Williams tube. It does. (The linked article in the Atlantic is guilty, though.) It also links to an Amazon review championing Mauchly and Eckert; but there was a recent bio of Atanasoff (whose title I'm blanking on) saying basically that Mauchly ripped off Atanasoff, and von Neumann had plenty of contact with both sides, had a better grasp of Atanasoff's ideas, and probably worked behind the scenes to promote them and make sure they weren't patent-encumbered. (IIRC Atanasoff had a universal computer in mind but didn't try to make one as his first project because he wasn't going to get stuck Babbage-style taking on too much at once.) Not to say this review may not have a point. I haven't finished Dyson's book yet.

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- abecedarius 15y ago
  That's interesting about the 601 -- can you say more? I checked a half-dozen pages about it and one said it used "special relays" and the others said nothing about the implementation.
  - rst 15y ago
    Looks like I may have blown it --- confusing this machine with the 603. I hate when that happens, but happy for the correction. (I'll try to delete the earlier comment, mischaracterizing the 601, just to try to head off the error at the pass...)
    - abecedarius 15y ago
      Ah, no problem. I looked up the book on Atanasoff -- it's by Jane Smiley, and I should add that she clearly didn't understand computers (most egregiously, she seemed to think 'digital' meant 'electronic'). Still, not taking her judgments for granted, I thought there was some interesting history there I hadn't heard about, and Atanasoff really seemed to have gotten a lot right earlier than most, and Mauchly to have only subtracted value from what he'd learned from him. (Eckert on the other hand came off as a great engineer.) I have no independent knowledge of this stuff, however.

deleted 15y ago

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abecedarius 15y ago
That's interesting about the 601 -- can you say more? I checked a half-dozen pages about it and one said it used "special relays" and the others said nothing about the implementation.
- rst 15y ago
  Looks like I may have blown it --- confusing this machine with the 603. I hate when that happens, but happy for the correction. (I'll try to delete the earlier comment, mischaracterizing the 601, just to try to head off the error at the pass...)
  - abecedarius 15y ago
    Ah, no problem. I looked up the book on Atanasoff -- it's by Jane Smiley, and I should add that she clearly didn't understand computers (most egregiously, she seemed to think 'digital' meant 'electronic'). Still, not taking her judgments for granted, I thought there was some interesting history there I hadn't heard about, and Atanasoff really seemed to have gotten a lot right earlier than most, and Mauchly to have only subtracted value from what he'd learned from him. (Eckert on the other hand came off as a great engineer.) I have no independent knowledge of this stuff, however.