Overview

The first electronic computer was arguably the ABC computer designed and built by John V. Atanasoff and Clifford E. Berry at Iowa State University in 1938 to solve sets of linear equations. The first general-purpose electronic computer, the ENIAC, was completed eight years later in 1946, and could solve a larger and much more general set of mathematical problems. The subsequent lawsuit involving patent rights between Ata-nasoff and the lead designers of the ENIAC, John W. Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert, resulted in a court decision in November 1971 that gave Atanasoff credit for inventing regenerative memory using a rotating drum and electronic adders, ruling the ENIAC patent for these components invalid. Much of the testimony in this trial focused on several meetings between Mauchly and Atanasoff in Atanasoff s laboratory in 1941 [Burks 1988, Burks 2003]. The ENIAC developers were awarded credit for many other features, however, and its speed improvement over the ABC computer was enormous. These two computers, along with several others of note, marked the beginning of the electronic computing era. Centralized computer systems then developed quickly with the invention of compilers, linkers and loaders, operating systems, and file systems during the 1950s and 1960s.

During the 1960s the concepts of multiple computer systems and computer networks were developed. Along with these systems, an important paper on data allocation in distributed file systems was written in 1969 by Wesley Chu, at...