The Iowa State physicist who, with Clifford Berry, built the first electronic digital computer in Ames.
As a physics professor at Iowa State College in Ames, John Vincent Atanasoff set out to build a machine that could solve large systems of equations. With his graduate student Clifford Berry, he designed and built the Atanasoff–Berry Computer (ABC) between 1937 and 1942.
The ABC pioneered electronic binary computation and regenerative memory. In 1973 a federal court, in Honeywell v. Sperry Rand, ruled that Atanasoff — not the later ENIAC — was the legal inventor of the electronic digital computer.
The machine Atanasoff built in Ames sits at the origin of the entire computer age. Iowa State honors the ABC with a full working reconstruction, and Atanasoff received the National Medal of Technology.
His breakthrough gives Iowa a founding claim on modern computing.
The Iowa State physicist who, with Clifford Berry, built the first electronic digital computer in Ames.
John Atanasoff was from Ames, Iowa.
1903–1995.
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