Download The Man Who Invented the Computer: The Biography of John Atanasoff, Digital Pioneer AudioBook Free

From one of our own most acclaimed novelists, a David-and-Goliath biography for the digital time. One evening in the past due 1930s, in a club on the Illinois-Iowa boundary, John Vincent Atanasoff, a teacher of physics at Iowa State University, after having a frustrating day undertaking tedious mathematical calculations in his lab, hit on the theory that the binary quantity system and electronic digital switches, coupled with an array of capacitors on the moving drum to serve as memory space, could yield a processing machine that could make his life and the lives of other similarly burdened scientists easier. Then he went back and built the device. It worked. Depends upon changed. We will know the name of John Atanasoff as well as we know those of Alan Turing and John von Neumann? Because he never patented these devices, and because the designers of the far-better-known ENIAC probably stole critical ideas from him. However 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 instructs the quintessentially American report of the child of immigrants John Atanasoff with technical clearness and narrative drive, making the contest to build up digital processing as gripping as a real-life techno-thriller.

Category: Scientists