Electronic

John Vincent Atanasoff conceived basic design principles for the first electronic-digital computer in the winter of 1937 and, assisted by his graduate student, Clifford E. Berry, constructed a prototype here in October 1939. It used binary numbers, direct logic for calculation, and a regenerative memory. It embodied concepts that would be central to the future development of computers. "It was at an evening of bourbon and 100 mph car rides," Atanasoff said, "when the concept came, for an electronically operated machine, that would use base-two (binary) numbers instead of the traditional base-10 numbers, condensers for memory, and a regenerative process to preclude loss of memory from electrical failure." Atanasoff wrote most of the concepts of the first modern computer on the back of a cocktail napkin. Then, in late 1939, John V. Atanasoff teamed up with Clifford E. Berry to build a prototype. They created the first computing machine to use electricity, vacuum tubes, binary numbers and capacitors. The capacitors were in a rotating drum that held the electrical charge for the memory. Berry, with his background in electronics and mechanical construction skills, was the ideal partner for Atanasoff. The prototype won the team a grant of $850 to build a full-scale model. They spent the next two years further improving the Atanasoff-Berry Computer (aka ABC). The final product was the size of a desk, weighed seven hundred pounds, had more than three hundred vacuum tubes, and contained a mile of wire. It could calculate about one operation every fifteen seconds, today a computer can calculate 150 billion operations in fifteen seconds. Too large to go anywhere, it remained in the basement of the physics department. The war effort prevented Atanasoff from finishing the patent process and doing any further work on the computer. When they needed storage space in the physics building, they dismantled the Atanasoff-Berry Computer.

CERN Experimental Instrumentation

Anonymous — Wed, 25 Jul 2012 07:38:56 +0000

CERN Experimental Instrumentation

(not verified) Wed, 07/25/2012 - 03:38

Society

IEEE

Main Category

Electrical

Sub Category

Nuclear and Plasma Sciences

Era

1960-1969

Date Created

1968

Location Country

Coordinates

46.234167, 6.052778

Address1

European Organization for Nuclear Research

Address2

Route de Meyrin 385

City

Geneva

State

Meyrin

Country

Switzerland

Zip

1217

Website

http://www.ieeeghn.org/wiki/index.php/Milestones:CERN_Experimental_Instrumentat…

Creator

Charpak, Georges

The 1992 Nobel Prize in physics was awarded to Georges Charpak, France, for his invention and development of detectors in high energy physics. Since 1959 Charpak had worked at CERN, the European laboratory for particle physics situated in the canton of Geneva in Switzerland. Charpak invented the multi - wire proportional chamber at CERN. The pioneering work was published in 1968. Largely due to his work particle physicists have been able to focus their interest on very rare particle interactions, which often reveal the secrets of the inner parts of matter. Sometimes only one particle interaction in a billion is the one searched for. The experimental difficulty lies in choosing the very few but exceptionally interesting particle interactions out of the many observed. Photographic methods, once so very successful in exploring particle processes, are not good enough for this. In the new wire chamber Charpak used modern electronics and reali z ed the importance of connecting the detector directly to a computer. The invention made it possible to increase the data collection speed with a factor of a thousand compared to previous methods for registering charged particle trajectories. At the same time the high spatial resolution was very often considerably improved. His fundamental idea has since been developed and for more than two decades Charpak has been at the forefront of this development. The development of detectors very often goes hand in hand with progress in fundamental research. Various types of particle detectors based on Charpak's original invention have been of decisive importance for many discoveries particle physics during the last two decades. Several of these have been awarded the Nobel Prize in physics. Charpak has actively contributed to the use of is new type of detector in various applications in for example medicine and biology.