Origin of Computers Debate Stirs Over Origin of Computers> by Kevin Maney USA Today September 1997 The lid is about to come off one of history's technology feuds. The battle is over who invented the computer: J. Presper Eckert and John Mauchly of ENIAC fame or less-famous University Professor John Atanasoff. It's bitter, it's dramatic and it's about hanging the course of history. It makes grudge boys Bill Gates and Scott McNealy look like two kids fighting over a Microsoft Barney doll.

Of course, the first computer was invented a long time ago and the principal players are all dead. But Iowa State has just spent three years and $300,000 constructing an exact duplicate of Atanasoff's machine--in part to disprove claims that it never actually worked. The Iowa State folks will turn it on for the first time in public October 8. If it doesn't electrocute somebody--apparently a real concern with this contraption--it might just solve a couple of equations and once again rile all the interested parties.

The story starts in the mid 1930s with Atanasoff driving 100 mph down a yardstick-straight Iowa road. "He would drive at high speeds on idle roads to clear his mind when he was working on physics problems," says John Gustafson, a professor at Iowa State and the leader of the project to reconstruct Atanasoff's computer. "It was, I'm told, a terrifying experience to get in the car with Atanasoff at the wheel."

Atanasoff was thinking about computers. There were already mechanical and analog computers. But Atanasoff thought there might be better methods of computing. He drove from dry Iowa to a bar over the Illinois line, drank three Scotch and waters, and had a Eureka! moment.

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