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The Man Who Invented the Computer
Jane Smiley
The Biography of John Atanasoff, Digital Pioneer
Doubleday
October 2010
On Sale: October 19, 2010
256 pages
ISBN: 0385527136
EAN: 9780385527132
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction Biography
From one of our most acclaimed novelists, a
David-and-Goliath biography for the digital age. One night in the late 1930s, in a bar on the Illinois–Iowa
border, John Vincent Atanasoff, a professor of physics at
Iowa State University, after a frustrating day performing
tedious mathematical calculations in his lab, hit on the
idea that the binary number system and electronic switches,
combined with an array of capacitors on a moving drum to
serve as memory, could yield a computing machine that would
make his life and the lives of other similarly burdened
scientists easier. Then he went back and built the machine.
It worked. The whole world changed. Why don’t we know the name of John Atanasoff as well as we
know those of Alan Turing and John von Neumann? Because he
never patented the device, and because the developers of the
far-better-known ENIAC almost certainly stole critical ideas
from him. But in 1973 a court declared that the patent on
that Sperry Rand device was invalid, opening the
intellectual property gates to the computer revolution. Jane Smiley tells the quintessentially American story of the
child of immigrants John Atanasoff with technical clarity
and narrative drive, making the race to develop digital
computing as gripping as a real-life techno-thriller.
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