Biography on john blankenbaker

I (John Blankenbaker) started the design of a computing device in the winter of 1949 when I was a physics freshman at Oregon State College (now Oregon State University). My motivation was the need to do the calculations by using logarithms for the weekly physics lab, a very tedious job.

The inspiration was an article in either Popular Mechanics or Popular Science which told about a computing device. The article said very little except that the machine used thousands of vacuum tubes but used only two digits, 0 and 1.

Biography on john blankenbaker and sons

I did not worry about the thousands of tubes but instead I concentrated on how to write numbers with only 0 and 1 and on how to do calculations with these numbers. It is embarrassing how long it took me to hurdle these two questions.

Then I asked how could I do these things with mechanical devices such as relays. The design as it evolved was a real kludge and far too expensive for my budget but it whetted my desire to learn more about computers.

Fortunately, in the sum