Dispute origins
The case was a combination of two separate lawsuits: one brought by Sperry Rand Corporation and its holding company Illinois Scientific Developments against Honeywell Corporation in Washington, D.C. charging Honeywell with patent infringement and demanding royalties, and a countersuit filed in Minneapolis, Minnesota by Honeywell charging Sperry Rand with monopoly and fraud and seeking the invalidation of the ENIAC patent, alleged to be infirm. Both suits were filed on May 26, 1967, with Honeywell filing just minutes earlier, a fact that would later have tremendous bearing on the case. The trial was presided over by U.S. District Court Judge Earl R. Larson between June 1, 1971, and March 13, 1972, in Minneapolis, Minnesota, a jurisdiction decided when United States District Court for the District of Columbia, D.C. Circuit Chief Judge John Sirica ruled that Honeywell had won the May 26 race to file the suit in court. Attorneys for Sperry Rand wanted the case to be tried in Washington, D.C., a district perceived to be friendlier to the rights of patent holders; by contrast, Honeywell was at the time the largest private employer in Minnesota. The plaintiff's final 500-page brief in the case was filed September 30, 1972. Chief among the disputes ''Honeywell v. Sperry Rand'' was to resolve were: * The legality of a 1956 patent-sharing agreement between Sperry Rand and IBM (itself born out of patent litigation), which was contended to represent an illegal collusion in violation of antitrust laws. * The enforceability and validity of the patent for the ENIAC filed by its inventors J. Presper Eckert and John W. Mauchly, a patent which by that time had come to be held by Sperry Rand Corporation through a series of corporate acquisitions and mergers. The patent on the ENIAC, , application date June 26, 1947, issue date February 4, 1964, had been placed with a Sperry Rand subsidiary, Illinois Scientific Developments, newly created for the express purpose of marketing licenses for the newly issued patent. Because it was ostensibly the patent on the premiere electronic digital computer, Sperry Rand held that this patent entitled them to collect royalties on the sales of all electronic digital computers in what was by the late 1960s a rapidly expanding data processing industry, including Honeywell, Control Data, Burroughs Corporation, Burroughs, RCA, National Cash Register, General Electric, and Philco-Ford, and peripheral equipment manufacturers. (Illinois Scientific Developments demanded royalties of $250 million from Honeywell initially, a figure that was lowered to $20 million prior to the start of litigation, and $150 million altogether from the other listed firms.) * The enforceability (but not the validity) of what was known as the 30A package of patents filed by Eckert and Mauchly and held by Sperry Rand, which included patents for a delay-line memory system (, applied for October 31, 1947, and issued in 1953) and a number of serial binary adders. * Royalties (and damages, legal fees, court costs, etc.) owed Sperry Rand by Honeywell should their patents be found valid and enforceable. With 135 days of oral courtroom testimony by 77 witnesses—and the presentation of the deposition of an additional 80 witnesses—for a total trial transcript of 20,667 pages, ''Honeywell v. Sperry Rand'' was at that time the longest trial in the history of the federal court system. It was preceded by six years of litigation that produced thousands of pages of under-oath depositions. The court marked 25,686 exhibits for the plaintiff Honeywell; defendants Sperry Rand and its subsidiary Illinois Scientific Developments contributed 6,968 exhibits. The corporations on the two sides spent a combined more than $8 million pursuing the case. The resulting exhibits and testimony constitute a massive evidentiary record describing the invention and development of the electronic digital computer. Materials relevant to the case but not entered into evidence have appeared, but sparsely and infrequently, since the case's conclusion in 1973. The computer played a major role in the prosecution of the case for plaintiff Honeywell. A computerized record of documents pertaining to the case, known as Electronic Legal Files (or ELF), allowed Honeywell attorneys to store, sort, recall, and print information on hundreds of different subjects.The decision
More than seven months following the end of courtroom testimony, Judge Earl R. Larson's decision was published on October 19, 1973, in a document, over 248 pages long, titled ''Findings of Fact, Conclusions of Law, and Order for Judgement''.Derivation controversy
Finding 3 was the most controversial, as it assigned the invention of the electronic digital computer by judicial fiat to John Vincent Atanasoff, John V. Atanasoff: Charges of derivation stemmed from testimony and correspondence describing meetings between Atanasoff and Mauchly in December 1940 and June 1941, the first at the University of Pennsylvania where Atanasoff attended a talk given by Mauchly at a meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science on use of Mauchly's harmonic analyzer (a simple analog computer) to speed the calculation of meteorological data to test for periodicities in precipitation, and the second in Ames, Iowa where Mauchly had driven to visit Atanasoff for a period of five days and to examine his progress on a special-purpose computing machine whose construction Atanasoff had described for Mauchly at the prior meeting. (In the Discovery (law), discovery process leading up to ''Honeywell v. Sperry Rand'', this device came to be called the Atanasoff–Berry Computer, or ABC; Clifford Berry had been Atanasoff's graduate student assistant in the computer development project in the basement of the physics building at Iowa State University, Iowa State College and in 1942 the two of them left Iowa State for positions in war research—Atanasoff in Washington, D.C. and Berry in Pasadena, California.) All parties agree that Mauchly had opportunity to see the ABC, which was then in a sufficiently advanced state of construction to demonstrate many if not all of its general principles. There is disagreement about (and no definitive evidence regarding) the extent to which Mauchly understood—or indeed was interested in or capable of understanding—the circuit designs incorporated in the machine. The ABC's inventors considered their invention novel and patentable. The same trip to Philadelphia in December 1940 included a visit to the Patent Office in Washington, D.C. to conduct patent searches—so Dr. Mauchly's contention under oath that the ABC's inventors were deliberately hesitant about revealing all of the machine's details would seem to be credible. All parties agreed that Mauchly took away with him no written technical description of the ABC. However, he was familiar enough with the ABC's basic method of operation, particularly the involvement of its rotating capacitor memory drum, to have described it to J. Presper Eckert in 1943 or 1944, and to have recounted it in some detail in a 1967 deposition, over 26 years after having visited the ABC in June 1941. Correspondence from Mauchly to Atanasoff following Mauchly's visit was touted by the plaintiff as a smoking gun. Considered to be particularly damning to the Sperry Rand case were the following often-quoted excerpts: Taken in context, this and other letters entered into evidence in ''Honeywell v. Sperry Rand'' evinced a spirit of cordiality and mutual admiration between Mauchly and Atanasoff, one that would continue into the 1940s, as Atanasoff recommended Mauchly for part-time consulting work at the Naval Ordnance Laboratory in 1943 and Mauchly continued to visit Atanasoff in White Oak, Maryland throughout 1944, where Mauchly served as mentor, guide, and sounding board to some of those on Atanasoff's staff. ''Honeywell v. Sperry Rand'' and the decision it culminated in emphasized the differences between the ENIAC and the ABC, some of which were: * The ENIAC was electronic digital computing machines, while the ABC was a semi-electronic (''i.e.'', only the computing was electronic, the control and synchronization was electromechanical using timing control drum), special-purpose (''i.e.'', non-programmable) machine intended to solve systems of linear equations via a modified Gaussian elimination algorithm. * The two machines were incomparable in size, scope of design, and cost. * Both the ENIAC and ABC used triode vacuum tubes, but the ABC computed ''logically'' using ''binary'' adder circuits, whereas the ENIAC computed ''enumeratively'' using ''decimal'' ring counters. (For proponents of Mauchly's claims to have been influenced not by the ABC but by Counter (digital), scaling circuits used to count cosmic rays at Swarthmore College, this is a significant distinction: if Mauchly derived any work from Atanasoff, why did he not appropriate for the ENIAC Atanasoff's add-subtract mechanism, in principle the most novel and enduring aspect of the ABC?) * Most significantly to the legacies of the two devices, the ABC was never used in any practical way for the computational task for which it was constructed, owing in part to its need to write and read interim results to paper cards using an ill-conceived input-output system too error-prone for solving large systems of equations. The ENIAC, conversely, lived a useful service life spanning almost a decade, and was used for computational jobs in numerous scientific fields. Through its successor machine the EDVAC and the principles disseminated at the Moore School Lectures, the ENIAC influenced all future computing machines. The ABC was dismantled (with only a few of its basic components of its memory and arithmetic unit salvaged) without having been patented, published, or publicly demonstrated or described; thus it influenced no other computing machines, except insofar as such influence was transmitted through John Mauchly's exposure to the device (but again, derivation by Mauchly of any concept in the ABC is still a subject of controversy). Following the ruling, some writers perceived recognition of Atanasoff for his title as "father of the computer" was slow in coming, and wrote books of their own. These included Pulitzer Prize-winning Iowan reporter Clark R. Mollenhoff and wife-and-husband team Alice Burks and Arthur Burks. (Arthur had been on the ENIAC's engineering staff and had requested to be added as a co-inventor following the issuance of the ENIAC patent; Alice Burks had been a human computer, computer at the Moore School of Electrical Engineering, Moore School.) Since the time of the ruling, the ''IEEE Annals of the History of Computing'' has served as the principal battleground for articles debating the derivation controversy. Therein John Mauchly's widow Kathleen Antonelli, Kay published her retort to the first Burks article following her husband's 1980 death. An article by Calvin Mooers, a former employee of Atanasoff's at the Naval Ordnance Laboratory, was published posthumously; in it, he questioned Atanasoff's commitment to and capacity for development of computing machines even when provided with ample financial resources.References
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