In his patent application for Eniac, he and his fellow designer J. Mauchly was not a better scientist than Atanasoff, but he was a more ambitious entrepreneur. And the ABC itself is overshadowed by Eniac, an early computer conceived by the physicist John Mauchly. In the technological pantheon, Atanasoff is overshadowed by the likes of Alan Turing, who laid the intellectual groundwork for the computer and helped crack the German Enigma code during World War II. “I did not want to search and invent,” he confessed, “but sadly I turned in that direction.”Ītanasoff’s device became known as the Atanasoff-Berry Computer, or the ABC - except that it hardly became known at all. In response, Atanasoff designed a machine to do what his own mind could not. That process grows more arduous as equations grow more complex, and by the 1930s, as Smiley recounts, the difficulty of calculation was impeding scientific advancement. Anyone who has studied calculus knows that solving differential equations is a tedious process: labor-intensive, error-prone, slow.
The title character - the real-life “guy at Iowa State” - is John Vincent Atanasoff, a physicist and mathematician who invented the computer largely out of frustration. Now, in Smiley’s new book, “The Man Who Invented the Computer,” we have the long version.
forgot about the old machine, and threw it out.” “The short version,” he explains, “is that the guy at Iowa State who invented the computer in the late ’30s never patented a thing. To that end, he hopes to pry major grant money out of the agricultural industry, and he wields the history of the computer as both cautionary tale and crowbar. “You know the story of the invention of the computer?” one character asks another midway through Jane Smiley’s best-selling 1995 novel “Moo.” The speaker, an animal scientist, dreams of striking it rich by pioneering a new dairy-farming technology.
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