Name: The Man Who Invented the Computer
ISBN: 9780385527132

The Man Who Invented the Computer

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, opening the intellectual property gates to the computer revolution. Jane Smiley tells the quintessentially American story of the child of immigrants John Atanasoff with technical clarity and narrative drive, making the race to develop digital computing as gripping as a real-life techno-thriller. - Publisher.

What Hacker News says

h1ccupDec 2013

This is my list(Most of these books aren't from 2013): 1. The Man Who Invented the Computer: The Biography of John Atanasoff by Jane Smiley

2. Halting State by Charlie Stross

3. Levels of Life by Julian Barnes

4. The Particle At The End Of The Universe by Sean Carrol

5. Churchil Bomb by Graham Farmello

6. The Science Of Memory by Charles Fernyhough

7. The Anatomy of Violence: The biological roots of crime by Adrian Raine

8. The Bet: Paul Ehrlich, Julian Simon, and our gamble over Earth’s future by Paul Sabin

9. Experiencing Art: In the brain of the beholder by Arthur Shimamura

10. The Spark: A Mother’s Story of Nurturing Genius by Kristine Barnett

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webwanderingsMay 2012

There's a lot of interesting discussion on Mauchly in The Man Who Invented the Computer: The Biography of John Atanasoff

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nkassisDec 2010

In a similar vein I just finished reading "the man who invented the computer" by Jane Smiley. It's mainly about John Atanasoff but it includes other important figures of early computer development such as Turing, Zuse, Mauchly,Eckert, Von Neumann...

Just came but worth buying if you don't know the story of the ABC and it's relationship to ENIAC.

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nkassisDec 2010

This reminds me a little of a book I just read "The Man Who Invented the Computer: The Biography of John Atanasoff, Digital Pioneer"

A similar thing happened between Atanasoff and the guys who designed ENIAC. It led to a huge court battle in the 70s where Honywell & CDC were fighting IBM and cie's patents. It was found out that John Mauchly, one of the two main creators of ENIAC, visited Atanasoff in Iowa while Atanasoff was building the first electronic digital computer (I'm sure that's debated) and learn enough about it that the court found that the patents he held with J. Presper Eckert were most likely lifted from research Atanasoff was doing.

The fact that those patents have been overturned today is good, else IBM would have killed the early PC industry.

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