jQuery experiments: Expand/Collapse Complex Content
In these examples accessibility is taken into account. The expand/collapse functionality is keyboard accessible by tabbing to the item of interest and pressing 'ENTER' to expand/collapse.
For simplicity, the values of all fragment identifiers are "#". An example with
a small script for automatically applying relevant unique values to the href and title attributes could be seen here:
jQuery: Accordion with corresponding href and title attributes
With JavaScript turned off, the whole content is expanded, the links [Expand All] and [Collapse All] are needless and could only confuse the user. That's why, to separate the behaviour from the content, these elements are inserted using jQuery.
Instead of filling this page with dummy text, in the examples below I used excerpts from the very interesting biography of John V. Atanasoff - the man who invented the world's first electronic digital computer.
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John V. Atanasoff
Section 1: John Vincent Atanasoff - The father of the computer (October 4, 1903 - June 15, 1995)
The man who invented the computer
John Vincent Atanasoff was a mathematician and theoretical physicist. Between 1939 and 1942, in the Iowa State College, with the assistance of one of his students Clifford E. Berry he created the first electronic digital computer - ABC (Atanasoff-Berry Computer).
John Vincent Atanasoff was born in Hamilton, New York on 4 October 1903. His father, Ivan Atanasov, was born in the village of Boiajik, Bulgaria. When he was only 1 year old, he lost his parents during the April Uprising of the Bulgarians against the Turkish domination. Twelve years later, in 1889, Ivan Atanasov immigrated in the United States accompanied by his uncle. They first arrived in Ellis Island where Ivan’s last name was changed to Atanasoff. Later, he married a mathematics schoolteacher Iva Lucena Purdy. Beside John, they had 8 more children.
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John Atanasoff graduated from the University of Florida in 1925 with a Bachelor of Science degree in electrical engineering. He received MSc degree in mathematics from Iowa State College in June 1926. Four years later, Atanasoff obtained his doctoral degree in theoretical physics from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. During the hard weeks of calculations, indispensable for his thesis "The Dielectric Constant of Helium", the shortcomings of the existing mechanical calculators were painfully obvious to Atanasoff and motivated him to think about the possibility of developing a more sophisticated calculating machine.
After completion of his doctorate, Atanasoff accepted an assistant professor position in mathematics and physics at Iowa State College. In the university, Dr. Atanasoff started to make various experiments with vacuum tubes and radio signals, as well as different electronic devices, being really determined to develop an advanced computing machine. During his work Dr. Atanasoff experimented with different analog and digital mathematical devices and came to the conclusion that the analog devices were too restrictive and could not get the type of accuracy he wanted. Thus he start to envisage a computational device that was "digital".
"Atanasoff struggled for years to find a physical way to perform arithmetic that was digital instead of analog. He appears to have been the first to draw the distinction between the two, and to coin the term “computer” for a mechanical device. He thought about parallel processing much the way we do now, in that he considered connecting 30 commodity devices (mechanical Monroe calculators) to attain the necessary speed. He discarded this approach as clumsy and error-prone. In late 1937, he suddenly made the mental leap that provided him with what he was seeking while at a roadhouse near the Mississippi River." (Reconstruction of the ABC - J. Gustafson ISU, Ames)
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John V. Atanasoff, 1938
Section 2
The man who invented the computer
John Vincent Atanasoff was a mathematician and theoretical physicist. Between 1939 and 1942, in the Iowa State College, with the assistance of one of his students Clifford E. Berry he created the first electronic digital computer - ABC (Atanasoff-Berry Computer).
Around year 1937, Dr. John Atanasoff was still obsessed with the computer problem he was trying to solve. By that time he had worked out some of the general principles, like separating the computing functions from the memory or storage functions, and using a mathematical base of something other than our conventional base 10 or decimal system. That wasn't enough to build a computer on yet, but at that point he couldn't figure out how to proceed. As the story in various sources tells, including the Iowa State Collage archives:
"...in the winter months of 1937. One night, frustrated after many discouraging events, he got into his car and started driving without destination. Two hundred miles later, he pulled onto a roadhouse in the state of Illinois. Here, he had a drink of bourbon and continued thinking about the creation of the machine. No longer nervous and tense, he realized that these thoughts were coming together clearly. He began generating ideas on how to build this computer!"
His first insight was to build an electronically operated rather than mechanical device - something that had never been done before. His second great insight was to use a binary (or base 2) system of numbers rather than a decimal. His machine would compute by direct logical action rather than enumeration, as in analog devices. He had also worked out a way of using the positive and negative charges in capacitors to store the information bits which can have one of two possible values or states: 1/ON or 0/OFF that make up the binary system. This line of thinking led to what was to be his most significant achievement: the development of an electronic switch known as a logic circuit.
During the period 1937-42, Atanasoff built two electronic computers. After receiving a grant of $650 from Iowa State College in March 1939, Atanasoff hired a talented electrical engineering student, Clifford E. Berry, to assist him. Berry worked with Dr. Atanasoff from 1939 to 1942. The prototype was built in a couple of months, and it was first demonstrated in October, 1939, for the purpose of testing two ideas central to Atanasoff's design: capacitors to store data in binary form and electronic logic circuits. A December demonstration prompted a grant for construction of the full-scale machine known as the Atanasoff-Berry Computer, or ABC, as it was later named. From 1939 until 1942, Dr. John V. Atanasoff and Clifford E. Berry worked on developing and improving the ABC. However, because of the onset of World War II, Atanasoff and Berry discontinued work.
"By the time World War II had taken everyone away from the project in June 1942, the ABC was in the state that we have reproduced, and that reproduction is a working computer. Had the war not interfered, Atanasoff was planning to make the instruction sequencing automatic instead of entered manually from the control panel, and to make the computer more general-purpose." (Reconstruction of the ABC - John Gustafson ISU, Ames)
Atanasoff's computer was the first electronic digital computing device and it greatly influenced the future of electronic computing technology. The ABC pioneered several important elements of modern computing. The first and probably most important was the use of binary arithmetic. The computer performed all the calculations using electronic logic circuits instead of mechanical switches and wheels. Atanasoff-Berry Computer used the principle from the Von Neumann architecture where the memory and the processing were separate. The ABC also pioneered another important idea using a regenerative capacitor memory that is still used now-days in Dynamic Random Access Memory. Because the stored charge slowly leaks away, capacitor memories need to be regenerated every few milliseconds. The first regenerative capacitor memory built was the rotating capacitor drum memory of the ABC. Each of its two drums stored 30 – 50 bit binary numbers, rotated at 60 rpm and was regenerated every rotation (1 Hz refresh rate). ABC was parallel, supporting up to 30 simultaneous operations.
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John V. Atanasoff
Section 3
The man who invented the computer
John Vincent Atanasoff was a mathematician and theoretical physicist. Between 1939 and 1942, in the Iowa State College, with the assistance of one of his students Clifford E. Berry he created the first electronic digital computer - ABC (Atanasoff-Berry Computer).
It is important to mention that the Atanasoff-Berry Computer was never patented and because of that it was not known until 1960's. Before this, the ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer) computer was considered as the first computer in modern words. The problem rose because at the end of his project John Atanasoff was called on duty for the Second World War and no one from the university did a patent on the ABC. However, in 1973 a U.S. District Court ruled that the ENIAC principals were taken from the ABC and stated the Atanasoff-Berry Computer as the first computer in the world. For more details around the patent issue, see the next section.
In 1970 John Atanasoff was invited to Bulgaria by the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, and the Bulgarian Government conferred to him the Order of Saints Cyril and Methodius, First Class (Bulgaria's highest honor accorded a scientist). This was before the 1973 court ruling and it was his first public recognition.
Later, in recognition of his achievement, Atanasoff received numerous honors and awards, including: Iowa Inventors Hall of Fame; Plaque, Iowa State University Physics Building; Honorary Membership, Society for Computer Medicine; Doctor of Science, Moravian College; Distinguished Achievement Citation, Iowa State University Alumni Association; Doctor of Science, Western Maryland College.
In recognition of his work, Atanasoff was awarded the National Medal of Technology by President George Bush in a Ceremony at the White House on November 13, 1990.
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John V. Atanasoff
Section 4
The man who invented the computer
John Vincent Atanasoff was a mathematician and theoretical physicist. Between 1939 and 1942, in the Iowa State College, with the assistance of one of his students Clifford E. Berry he created the first electronic digital computer - ABC (Atanasoff-Berry Computer).
The exact conditions around the patent issue are well described in a Wikipedia article:
"John Atanasoff met John Mauchly at the December 1940 meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Philadelphia, where Mauchly was demonstrating his "harmonic analyzer". This was an analog calculator for analysis of weather data. Atanasoff told Mauchly about his new digital device and invited him to see it. Also during the Philadelphia trip, Atanasoff and Berry visited the patent office in Washington, where their research assured them that their concepts were new. A January 15, 1941 story in the Des Moines Register announced the ABC as "an electrical computing machine" with more than 300 vacuum tubes that would "compute complicated algebraic equations. In June 1941 Mauchly visited Atanasoff in Ames, Iowa to see the ABC. During his four day visit as Atanasoff's houseguest, Mauchly thoroughly discussed the prototype ABC, examined it, and reviewed Atanasoff's design manuscript in detail. Up to this time Mauchly had not proposed a digital computer. In September 1942 Atanasoff left Iowa State for a wartime assignment as Chief of the Acoustic Division with the Naval Ordnance Laboratory (NOL) in Washington D.C. He entrusted his patent application for the ABC to Iowa State College administrators. It was never filed. Mauchly visited Atanasoff multiple times in Washington during 1943 and discussed Atanasoff's computing theories, but did not mention that he was working on a computer project himself until early 1944. (Mollenhoff, p. 62-66). John Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert's construction of ENIAC, the first general purpose electronic computer, during 1943-1946 was to lead to a legal dispute two decades later over who was the actual inventor of the computer.
By 1945 the Navy, too, had decided to build a large scale computer, on the advice of John von Neumann. Atanasoff was put in charge of the project, and he asked Mauchly to help with job descriptions for the necessary staff. However, Atanasoff was also given the responsibility for designing acoustic systems for monitoring atomic bomb tests. That job was made the priority, and by the time he returned from the testing at Bikini Atoll in July of 1946, the NOL computer project was shut down due to lack of progress, again on the advice of von Neumann.
Mauchly and Eckert applied for a patent on a "General-Purpose Electronic Computer" in 1947, which was finally granted in 1964. The rights to the patent had been sold in 1951 to Remington Rand (to become Sperry Rand); that company started demanding royalty payments from other computer manufacturers in the late 1960's.
The dispute over patent royalties eventually resulted in a lawsuit filed on May 26, 1967 by Honeywell Inc. against Sperry Rand in U.S. District Court in Minneapolis, Minnesota challenging the validity of the ENIAC patent. The trial, one of the longest and most expensive in the federal courts to that time, began on June 1, 1971, lasted until March 13, 1972, had 77 witnesses, plus 80 depositions and 30,000 exhibits. Atanasoff's machine was introduced as prior art. The case was legally resolved on Friday, October 19, 1973, when U.S. District Judge Earl R. Larson held the patent invalid, ruling that the ENIAC derived many basic ideas from the Atanasoff-Berry Computer. Judge Larson explicitly stated, "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 decision in Honeywell Inc. v. Sperry Rand Corp. et al., was so well supported that Sperry declined to appeal. The decision received little publicity at the time, perhaps because it was overshadowed by the Watergate Era "Saturday Night Massacre" firing of special prosecutor Archibald Cox by President Richard Nixon the next day. While legally vindicated, Atanasoff's victory was incomplete as the ENIAC, rather than the ABC, continued to be widely regarded as the first computer until after his death."
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John V. Atanasoff
Section 5
The man who invented the computer
John Vincent Atanasoff was a mathematician and theoretical physicist. Between 1939 and 1942, in the Iowa State College, with the assistance of one of his students Clifford E. Berry he created the first electronic digital computer - ABC (Atanasoff-Berry Computer).
On one of his return visits to Ames in 1948, Atanasoff was disappointed to learn that the original ABC had been dismantled, when the University converted the basement to classrooms. All of its pieces except for one memory drum were discarded. Neither Atanasoff nor Clifford Berry was ever notified that the computer was going to be destroyed. Fortunately, Dr. Atanasoff had kept his research papers.
In 1997, a team of researchers from Ames Laboratory (located on the Iowa State campus) finished building a working full-scale replica of the Atanasoff–Berry Computer at a cost of $350,000. This replica dispelled any doubt over whether or not the ABC actually could perform the tasks it was designed to do. The replica ABC is now on permanent display in the first floor lobby of the Durham Center for Computation and Communication at Iowa State University.
"The ABC is much smaller than the other early computers. The original dimensions were 1.5 m long, 0.91 m high, and 0.91 m wide... It was constructed in the basement of the physics building at ISU, which at the time was an open area interrupted only by support pillars. The basement was later finished with poured concrete walls and standard doors; the standard door width is 0.84 m. Hence, the computer was boxed in. After Atanasoff left ISU for Maryland, the ABC was seen only as an orphaned device taking up otherwise useful space. Since its frame was welded angle iron, the only way to remove it from the room was to cut it apart with a hacksaw. I feel we have most of the answer to the question: Why was the ABC destroyed? The answer is that it was 0.07 m too wide to go through the door. In reconstructing the ABC, we made one practical modification: we narrowed the frame enough so we would be able to go through a standard door." (Reconstruction of the ABC - John Gustafson ISU, Ames)
Today, one of the notable Buildings of Iowa State University is the Atanasoff Hall. It was built in 1969 and known as the Computer Science Building. It was given its current name in 1988.
Plaque, Iowa State University Physics Building, 1974
As a part of the Iowa State University's historical sign program, South of Physics Hall it is installed a memorial plaque with the following text:
Birthplace of the Computer
The world's first electronic digital computer was built on the Iowa State campus from 1939 through 1942 by John V. Atanasoff, a professor of physics and mathematics, and Clifford Berry, an engineering graduate student. Principles used in the Atanasoff-Berry Computer are the basis for modern computing, and Atanasoff is now considered the "father of the computer".
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John V. Atanasoff
Section 6
The man who invented the computer
John Vincent Atanasoff was a mathematician and theoretical physicist. With the assistance of one of his students Clifford E. Berry, in Iowa State College, in the years between 1939 and 1942, he created the ABC (Atanasoff-Berry Computer) that was the first electronic digital computer.
In his article Atanasoff, The Real Inventor, Jo Campbell cites John Hauptman, Iowa State University Associate Professor of Physics:
"I came here from Berkeley. You know Berkeley must have 20 Nobel prizes and they are proud of them; poets, physicists, chemists... When I found out Atanasoff's story and read his paper... It occurred to me that if Atanasoff had been at Berkeley in 1939 (with the Atanasoff-Berry Computer) he would have gotten a Nobel prize right away. Berkeley would not have waited a minute before going after a Nobel Prize and becoming known as the birthplace of the electronic digital computer. Here at Iowa State, it was just dropped. I sort of criticize Iowa for being too polite; not pushy enough."
Sources:
- http://www.johnatanasoff.com
- http://www.cs.iastate.edu/jva/index.shtml
- http://www.scl.ameslab.gov/ABC/Trial.html
- http://johngustafson.net/pubs/pub57/ABCPaper.htm
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Vincent_Atanasoff
- http://ei.cs.vt.edu/~history/do_Atanasoff.html
- http://www.columbia.edu/~td2177/JVAtanasoff/JVAtanasoff.html
- http://inventors.about.com/library/inventors/blatanasoff_berry.htm
- http://www.warbaby.com/FG_test/comp_history2.html
- http://www.fpm.iastate.edu/maps/memorials/historical_markers.asp
- http://www.intercom.net/local/shore_journal/joc10225.html