Clifford Berry

Clifford Berry grew up around broken radios in his father's appliance repair shop in small-town Iowa, and it showed: he graduated Marengo High School in 1934, valedictorian, at sixteen. At Iowa State College he earned a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering in 1939 and a master's in physics in 1941, and along the way became the graduate assistant of physics professor John Vincent Atanasoff, who had a theoretical design for an electronic calculating machine and needed someone who could actually build it. Berry could. He worked out the machine's rotating-drum memory and its vacuum-tube binary adder circuits, the engineering that turned Atanasoff's idea into hardware that ran.

Between 1939 and 1942, Berry and Atanasoff built a machine the size of a desk that used vacuum tubes, not gears or relays, to do arithmetic in binary — a first. It was built to solve systems of linear equations, weighed 700 pounds, and worked, but Atanasoff left for wartime research before it was patented or perfected, and the project was quietly shelved. Berry moved to Consolidated Engineering Corporation in Pasadena the same year he finished at Iowa State, and there had the more visible career: he built an analog computer in 1945 that solved linear equations for industrial labs, filed more than thirty patents mostly on mass spectrometry instruments, and by 1959 was chairing the field's leading research conference. For most of his life, the machine he built with Atanasoff was not famous. He was.

The machine's obscurity outlived him. Berry died on Long Island on October 30, 1963, days after accepting a new position as director of advanced development at a company there — a decade before a federal court, ruling in Honeywell v. Sperry Rand in 1973, found that ENIAC's celebrated inventors had drawn their key ideas from a 1941 visit to see the Atanasoff-Berry machine in Iowa, stripping ENIAC of its patent and its claim to being first. Berry never lived to hear a court say so. His own death carried an unresolved question of its own: the coroner's finding did not satisfy his widow, who disputed it, and Atanasoff himself later spoke of the possibility of foul play. No fuller account of what happened ever surfaced.

The 1973 ruling turned the Atanasoff-Berry Computer from a forgotten prototype into a landmark, and in 1990 the IEEE made it an official milestone in the history of computing. Iowa State later built a working replica and put it on permanent display. Historians still argue over the exact ranking — the ABC could not be reprogrammed, which is why some hold out for ENIAC or Britain's Colossus as the true first computer — but nobody argues Berry's engineering out of the story anymore. The IEEE Computer Society now lists him among its Computer Pioneers, honoring an engineer whose death on Long Island passed almost unremarked at the time.

Clifford Berry's life against the full span of the corpus.

• Atanasoff-Berry Computer invention
  Built with John Vincent Atanasoff; the first machine to use vacuum tubes for binary arithmetic 1942
• Rotating-drum capacitor memory invention
  His design for the ABC's storage system 1939
• 30-103 analog computer invention
  Built at Consolidated Engineering Corporation to solve linear equations for industrial labs 1945
• Mass spectrometry instrumentation patents patent
  More than thirty patents held by his death, mostly on mass spectrometer components —

• April 19, 1918 aged 0 Born in Gladbrook, Iowa
• 1934 aged ~16 Graduates Marengo High School at 16, valedictorian
• 1939 aged ~21 Earns a BS in electrical engineering, becomes Atanasoff's graduate assistant
• 1942 aged ~24 Completes the Atanasoff-Berry Computer and marries Martha Jean Reed Also the year he joined Consolidated Engineering Corporation in Pasadena.
• 1945 aged ~27 Builds the 30-103 analog computer for industrial linear-equation problems
• 1948 aged ~30 Earns a PhD in physics from Iowa State
• 1959 aged ~41 Chairs the Gordon Research Conference on Instrumentation
• October 30, 1963 aged 45 Dies on Long Island, New York
• October 19, 1973 aged 55 Honeywell v. Sperry Rand strips ENIAC of its patent, crediting Atanasoff's priority

• John Atanasoff 1903–1995
  Physicist who built the first electronic digital computer, the Atanasoff-Berry Computer. co-invented with
• John Mauchly 1907–1980
  Co-inventor of ENIAC, the first general-purpose electronic digital computer. priority dispute with
• J. Presper Eckert 1919–1995
  Co-inventor of ENIAC and pioneer of electronic computing alongside John Mauchly. priority dispute with