Jane Smiley has just recently completed the writing of a good biography of John Atanasoff. While there have been other claimants of the creation of the very 1st computer (and possibly one of the most important inventions of modern times) Atanasoff was indeed the 1st. A tangled web of confusion was delays in the patent process, which was finally settled in the the courts in the 1970s. One of the hidden gems of the story is that this all occurred in the midwest, at Iowa State University in Ames, Iowa. Additionaly, I, an alum of ISU, took computer science classes in the building named after him many years ago.
Check out the BusinessWeek story on this at: http://bit.ly/8ZsHG4
A John Atanasoff website: http://www.johnatanasoff.com/
Find the book at Amazon. It is now on my need-to-read book list: http://www.amazon.com/Man-Who-Invented-Computer-Biography/dp/0385527136
No comments:
Post a Comment