Replilca of Atanasoff Berry Computer at Computer History Museum

A full size working replica of the world’s first electronic computer is to be on display at The Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California. The original Atanasoff-Berry Computer was built at the Iowa State University from 1939 to 1942. A replica of the ABC, currently displayed in the lobby of Iowa State’s Durham Center will be moving to the museum next spring, as part of a 25,000-square-foot exhibition opening in the fall of 2010. The exhibition will show more than 1,000 artifacts to tell the story of computing history.

ABC, invented and built by John Vincent Atanasoff, former Iowa State professor of physics and mathematics, and Clifford Berry, former physics graduate student, weighed 750 pounds and used rotating drums as memory, ran on vacuum tubes and used a storage system that recorded numbers by burning marks onto cards.

The machine was the first ever to use concepts that are still part of today’s computers: a binary system of arithmetic, separate memory and computing functions, regenerative memory, parallel processing, electronic amplifiers as on-off switches, circuits for logical addition and subtraction, clocked control of electronic operations and a modular design.

The Atanasoff-Berry Computer’s place in computing history has been controversial and was even part of a federal court case. World War II interrupted work on the ABC, as Atanasoff and Berry moved on to other jobs and projects. J. Presper Eckert and John Mauchly, developers of the ENIAC machine at the University of Pennsylvania, were the first to be granted a patent on an electronic digital computer. But a U.S. District Judge in 1973, overturned the ENIAC patents, writing, “Eckert and Mauchly did not themselves first invent the automatic electronic digital computer, but instead derived that subject matter from one Dr. John Vincent Atanasoff.”

The original ABC was dismantled during the late 1940s and almost entirely thrown away. In 1997, a team of researchers, engineers, faculty members, retired faculty and students from Iowa State and the U.S. Department of Energy’s Ames Laboratory completed the replica after spending four years and a budget of $350,000.

The Computer History Museum’s other current exhibits include “Charles Babbage’s Difference Engine No. 2;” “Mastering the Game: A History of Computer Chess;” “Innovation in the Valley” – a look at Silicon Valley startups; the unique “Visible Storage Gallery,” featuring over 600 key objects from the collection; and the museum’s newest exhibit, “The Silicon Engine” – about the evolution of semiconductors. They also have an online exhibition at www.computerhistory.org