John Atanasoff

Atanasoff's father had fled Ottoman Bulgaria after soldiers killed his own father in the crackdown that followed the 1876 April Uprising; he settled in New York as an electrical engineer. His mother taught mathematics. Their son moved fast through school: a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering from the University of Florida in 1925, a master's in mathematics from Iowa State the next year, and a physics doctorate from the University of Wisconsin in 1930, his dissertation on the dielectric constant of helium. Iowa State hired him as an assistant professor of mathematics and physics. In 1936 he built an analog calculator for surface geometry, and two years later, driving to Rock Island, Illinois, he worked out the principles of a digital machine using binary numbers and vacuum tubes.

With a graduate student named Clifford Berry and a $650 grant, Atanasoff built the Atanasoff-Berry Computer between September and November 1939 — a machine that solved up to 29 simultaneous linear equations using binary numbers, vacuum tubes for computation, and regenerative capacitor memory, a technique close to what later became DRAM. Iowa State never filed a patent on it. In June 1941 a physicist named John Mauchly spent four days in Ames studying the prototype and Atanasoff's design manuscript, then went east to Pennsylvania and, with J. Presper Eckert, built ENIAC, the machine that took credit as the first electronic digital computer for the next three decades. Atanasoff left Iowa State that year for the Naval Ordnance Laboratory and never built the machine's successor himself.

For three decades almost no one called Atanasoff the inventor of the electronic digital computer; that title belonged to Mauchly and Eckert's ENIAC, patented and licensed by Sperry Rand to collect royalties across the entire computer industry. Atanasoff had left computing behind, running an ordnance company and then a cybernetics firm, when IBM's lawyers came looking for him in 1954 — not to honor him, but to find a witness who could break Sperry Rand's patent monopoly. He spent the better part of two decades testifying. In 1973, in Honeywell v. Sperry Rand, federal judge Earl R. Larson ruled that Eckert and Mauchly 'did not themselves first invent the automatic electronic digital computer, but instead derived that subject matter from one Dr. John Vincent Atanasoff.' The ENIAC patent was voided.

Recognition came from two directions. The United States gave him the National Medal of Technology in 1990, presented by President George H.W. Bush, the country's highest honor for technological achievement. Bulgaria, the homeland his father had fled, gave him more and gave it earlier — the Order of Saints Cyril and Methodius in 1970, honorary citizenship of the town his grandfather came from, and eventually an asteroid and a peak in Antarctica named for him. Iowa State, which never patented his machine, named a building after him instead. He died of a stroke at his Maryland home on June 15, 1995, ninety-one years old, having outlived both the lawsuit and most of the century he'd helped compute.

John Atanasoff's life against the full span of the corpus.

• The Dielectric Constant of Helium other
  Doctoral dissertation, University of Wisconsin 1930
• Analog calculator for surface geometry invention
  Built at Iowa State before the shift to a fully digital design 1936
• Atanasoff-Berry Computer invention
  Built with Clifford Berry; the first automatic electronic digital computer 1939
• Ordnance Engineering Corporation company
  Founded after federal service; later sold to Aerojet General 1952

• October 4, 1903 aged 0 Born in Hamilton, New York
• 1925 aged ~22 Earns a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering from the University of Florida
• 1930 aged ~27 Completes a physics doctorate at the University of Wisconsin
• 1936 aged ~33 Builds an analog calculator for surface-geometry problems at Iowa State
• November 1939 aged 36 Completes the Atanasoff-Berry Computer with graduate student Clifford Berry
• June 1941 aged 37 John Mauchly spends four days studying the ABC prototype in Ames
• 1941 aged ~38 Leaves Iowa State for wartime work at the Naval Ordnance Laboratory
• 1973 aged ~70 Honeywell v. Sperry Rand rules him the true inventor of the electronic digital computer
• June 15, 1995 aged 91 Dies at his home in New Market, Maryland

• Clifford Berry 1918–1963
  Co-inventor of the Atanasoff-Berry Computer, the first electronic digital computing device. built the ABC with
• John Mauchly 1907–1980
  Co-inventor of ENIAC, the first general-purpose electronic digital computer. a court ruled derived his ideas from him
• J. Presper Eckert 1919–1995
  Co-inventor of ENIAC and pioneer of electronic computing alongside John Mauchly. co-held the voided ENIAC patent
• Grace Hopper 1906–1992
  Computer scientist and Navy rear admiral who helped develop early programming languages and computing. fellow early computing pioneer, credited sooner