TY  - BOOK
AU  - Smiley,Jane
TI  - The man who invented the computer: the biography of John Atanasoff, digital pioneer 
SN  - 9780385527132 :
AV  - QA76.2.A75 S64 2010
PY  - 2010///
CY  - New York
PB  - Doubleday
KW  - Atanasoff, John V.
KW  - Sperry Rand Corporation
KW  - History
KW  - 20th century
KW  - Computer scientists
KW  - United States
KW  - Biography
KW  - Inventors
KW  - Physicists
KW  - Iowa
KW  - College teachers
KW  - Electronic digital computers
KW  - Patents
KW  - Intellectual property
N1  - Includes bibliographical references (p. 229-232) and index
N2  - 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 easier. Then he went back and built the machine. It worked, but he never patented the device, and 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 gates to the computer revolution. Biographer Jane Smiley makes the race to develop digital computing as gripping as a real-life techno-thriller.--From publisher description
ER  -