Cover of The Man Who Invented the Computer

The Man Who Invented the Computer

by Jane Smiley · first published 2010

4mentions
3recommended by
3HN commenters
2010–2013first – last mentioned

100% recommend

Biography & Memoir

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

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View on Open LibraryISBN 9780385527132

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