Word: abc
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Newspaper, magazine and television journalists relish commemorating, and few media outlets have allowed the occasion of the coming millennium to go uncontemplated. This week ABC weighs in with an homage to the current century. Seven years in the making, the project has cost the network $20 million, marking it as one of the most expensive undertakings in the history of the news division. Shapers of the documentary examined more than 3,000 hours of news footage and conducted hundreds of interviews...
...Norm Show (Wednesday, 9:30 p.m. E.T., ABC), Macdonald, in the least likely scenario since Manimal, plays an ex-hockey player who is avoiding jail by paying off a community-service sentence as a social worker. While Macdonald is often amusing, the sitcom never rises above mediocrity. The problem, besides the premise, is that Macdonald's sharp sarcasm may be a bit much over half an hour...
...until an obscure physicist named John Atanasoff came forth to dispute their claims. In the late 1930s, while teaching at Iowa State College, he and a graduate student named Clifford Bell began building a device that would allow them to solve large linear algebraic equations. Their machine, later called ABC (for Atanasoff Berry Computer), incorporated a number of novel features, including the separation of data processing from memory, and relied on binary numbers instead of ENIAC's clumsier decimal arithmetic. But Atanasoff was called away in 1942 to work for the Navy. Iowa State never filed for patents, and ABC...
...entirely forgotten. In the late 1960s, Sperry Rand, which held the rights to Eckert and Mauchly's original UNIVAC patents, sued Honeywell (which, like IBM, had got into the computer business) for royalty payments. At one point in the six-year litigation, Atanasoff testified that Mauchly cribbed ABC's key features during a five-day visit in 1941. Mauchly indignantly denied the accusation. But the judge took a different view. In a 1973 decision that was never appealed, he invalidated Eckert and Mauchly's patents and in effect declared Atanasoff the winner. Historians, however, interpret the ruling more broadly, viewing...
...invent the computer? Novel as it may have been, ABC could not be reprogrammed, did not handle large numbers well and never became fully operational. By contrast, the reprogrammable ENIAC did initial calculations for the H-bomb, kept flashing away for nearly a decade and led to a host of more sophisticated successors. Take your pick...