Magic Tree House Junie B. Jones 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, ope