When was clifford berry born

I wrote to Richards to find out more about the book that led to the correspondence, and I quote part of his answer: "Yes, I am writing a book on computers, and Cliff is to be mentioned in it in connection with Dr Atanasoff's computer inasmuch as Dr Atanasoff had told me on the telephone that many of the ideas in the machine, as well as the actual construction, should be credited to Cliff.

Over the years we had kept in touch with most of the men who had worked on the project. One was Robert L. Mather, now retired from work with the Navy, who wrote the following letter to me in Who were Atanasoff and Berry? Their names are not now found in common reference books, yet the stamp of the computer is on everyone's life. I knew these men first as an upper-level undergraduate student, then as an electronic technician , and later as friends.

One cannot describe them as they were some 40 years ago without being aware that the milieu of the day differs drastically from that of today. I realize from the August paper of JV see later that I came too late on the scene to know which ideas were contributed by JV and which by Cliff--no doubt that paper had contributions by both men. Both men were brilliant and either of them could have generated any of the key concepts. The craftsman in the Atanasoff-Berry team was Clifford E.

Cliff had graduated from ISC in as an electrical engineer and was working with JV as a graduate student when I first met him in He had a knack for electronics design which he learned as a radio amateur.

When I first knew him he was also well learned in graduate physics, and I was impressed that he thoroughly knew all the aspects of the computer that he was working on. Cliff was my admirable older brother, so to speak, while John Vincent Atanasoff whom was always called JV was more distant-not quite a father figure but an authority figure and also older.

Cliff could make things and could make them work. He valued home, children, and a stable marriage, yet aggressively sought new insights in every direction. I valued his friendship for the rest of his life. It is credited with being the first electronic digital computer-a claim that lies buried in patent litigation of the early s, a claim that was established by the court but that resulted in no financial gain to them or to Iowa State, and I believe, had little financial impact on the burgeoning computer industry.

One should realize that the IBM machines of those days were extremely cumbersome for calculations of any significant complexity. Their only competition was the electrically driven Monroe or Marchant mechanical calculator combined with pencil and paper and don't forget the eraser!

One should perhaps mention that at that time, IBM had an arrangement with the college that allowed Snedecor's lab to use their equipment at reduced cost a common arrangement. JV had made some overtures to IBM about some financial assistance for building his computer.

He felt that IBM wanted more out of such assistance than they deserved. At any rate he chose that more difficult task of finding funds elsewhere. Probably the greatest fault with the computer project was that it was seriously underfunded. There were too many cost-cutting decisions that sacrificed component reliability. There were not funds that would have carried the project through the debugging stage and into useful application. There was too much dependency on student-wage labor who were readily drawn away when jobs developed.

In fact, even JV was drawn away--faculty salaries were pretty low, also. JV did have ready application for such a machine, if it had been usable, in the graduate research his other students were doing.

Erwin Kammer was investigating the elastic constants of beta quartz, and at one point in the reduction of his data, systems of linear equations had to be solved. It was an appalling defect of the USA in the s that supporting funds for advanced development of useful tools were not available--a defect we learned more about in the s. The ABC was designed to solve systems of linear equations up to systems of 30 equations in 30 unknowns. Modern computer terminology allows succinct description of the process.

The process may be known to the reader as classical Gaussian elimination. Each coefficient was represented by a fixed-point bit number digit precision. The number was represented electronically by 50 plus or minus charges on 50 capacitors. The charges were read by vacuum tubes once per second and either replenished or modified according to the arithmetic process being implemented. Multiplication and division were done by electronic bit-shifting. A detailed description of the computer by Atanasoff himself is in Section 7.

I remember reading it in July as one of Cliff's ways of introducing me to the machine after I started working for him. Some of the photographs were added later-in fact, I think I may have taken some of them. I recall my hourly wage as 50 cents per hour. One of my first tasks was sorting screws and nuts in the basement student shop, and later with some coaching and supervision from Cliff I moved up to punching and wiring on the computer.

The picture on page of Randell's book showing the final state of the computer in May is very meaningful to me as I clearly remember cinching up those waxed-string lacings on the wire bundles over to the base-2 to base conversion drum. A similar bundle shows on the thyratron chassis beneath the IBM card reader. That chassis with 30 thyratrons was my creation. Those thyratrons drove the transformers, which punched the holes in the paper cards for the intermediate memory of the coefficients.

I've always wondered about the transients that would have resulted when the punching called for all 30 to fire simultaneously! The 50 capacitors for each coefficient were mounted radially to a row of 50 pins on the surface of a phenolic bakelite drum. There were 32 such rows on each drum giving a spare row or two. The drums revolved once per second under the stationary metal brushes leading to the electronics. All of the reading, computation, etc. Each drum had the coefficients of one linear equation.

A switch allowed a pair of corresponding coefficients from the two drums to be chosen for elimination. One set of coefficients was subtracted from the other the arithmetic was done in parallel for all 30 coefficients until the remainder turned positive.

Then divided, subtracted-and so on until the coefficient had been completely eliminated. The remaining coefficients were then put into punch-card memory. The process was repeated until the last unknown was given a numerical value, which could then be substituted in the next-to-last pair of equations to evaluate a second unknown, and so on until all the unknowns were evaluated. This process in not significantly different from modern-day computer procedure.

As Ralston's book points out, there is an optimum sequence for the elimination of coefficients and there are cumulative-numerical rounding errors that can be estimated.

One can estimate the total time required to solve a set of 30 linear equations with the ABC computer and it would be on the order of a day--very slow by modern standards. Still, by the standards of that would be very rapid. I left for the Naval Ordnance Laboratory in June Cliff had married in May, and he left Iowa for mass-spectrometer work with Consolidated Engineering Corp.

I think we all fully expected to reassemble in Ames after a hiatus for the war. In the postwar years the ABC was dismantled to make space for new academic activities required by the surge of returning veterans. Much legal argument was made during the litigation of the s about a visit of John Mauchly to Atanasoff in June I believe that Mauchly had support at that time from the Army's Aberdeen Proving Ground for computer research on computation of shell trajectories.

JV also had some war research support for experimentation in a room adjacent to the computer space. Several students were employed in that research, many of us were guinea pigs part time. My impression was that the purpose of the war research was to work out and measure some of the human factors in the visual tracking of targets such as by a gunner. We spent our time as subjects chasing galvanometer spots across a screen using various types of tracking controls. It seems now that Mauchly's visit would have been natural, and there would have been an expectation that JV would be quite open about all of his work that might be useful in the war effort.

I do recall a visitor to the computer in June whom I think must have been Mauchly although I was not introduced to him. It is evident in retrospect that Mauchly was much more adept at business skill, with support from his university, than JV was. The ENIAC involved an effort probably 1, times larger than the ABC, so that in comparing the two projects one needs to be careful as to what aspects are being compared.

Obviously the ENIAC benefited from a professional full-time staff, better quality control of components, longer-term support, and the blessings of adequate technical administration and management. In short, money. The ENIAC was a special-purpose machine primarily funded and designed to solve the differential equations of shell trajectories.

The shop was to provide a massive impact on the young Clifford as it soon became the first place in the area with a radio. The shop radio had been built by Clifford's father, Frederick, and it proved to be very popular among the local townsfolk. By the age of 11 Clifford had built his own ham radio.

Clifford excelled at school and was moved ahead to provide him with an intellectual challenge. A temporary move to Marengo ended in disaster when Frederick Berry was shot to death by a disgruntled employee.

The family remained in Marengo until Clifford was ready to attend Iowa State Browse all BookRags Study Guides. Trexler, who had been hired by Iowa State College to give them advice on how to protect their invention. The couple wed in May 30, in Ames, Iowa. They had two children, Carol and David. Berry received his M. After their marriage in , the couple left Iowa for a defense-related job Berry had been offered with Consolidated Engineering Corporation in Pasadena, California.

Under a special arrangement with Iowa State, he did his research in absentia and completed the requirements for the Ph. He became Chief Physicist at C. In early October he left C. He died suddenly on October 30, , before his family had a chance to join him in New York.

Berry was issued 19 patents in the area of mass spectrometry, 11 patents in various areas of vacuum and electronics and, at the time of his death, had 13 patents pending.

Clifford Berry CB Biography.