Databases Reference
In-Depth Information
16
Distributed Data
Allocation
All men are caught in a network of mutuality.
—Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929-1968)
he 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 sev-
eral meetings between Mauchly and Atanasoff in Atanasoff 's laboratory in 1941 [Burks
1988, Burks 2003]. The ENIAC developers were awarded credit for many other fea-
tures, 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 dur-
ing the 1950s and 1960s.
During the 1960s the concepts of multiple computer systems and computer net-
works were developed. Along with these systems, an important paper on data allocation
in distributed file systems was written in 1969 by Wesley Chu, at Bell Labs, and then a
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