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

Jane Smiley

ISBN 10: 0385527136 / ISBN 13: 9780385527132

Published by Doubleday & Co., New York, NY, 2011

About this Item

The book is spotless and completely free of wear or damage. The dust jacket is also completely clean and has no holes, creases, chips or tears. It does show very slight wrinkling. Book and dust jacket will be bubble-wrapped and shipped in a sturdy box to ensure safe transit.

Seller Inventory # ABH7697

Bibliographic Details

• Title: The Man Who Invented the Computer: The Biography of John Atanasoff, Digital Pioneer
• Publisher: Doubleday & Co., New York, NY
• Publication Date: 2011
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0385527136
• ISBN 13: 9780385527132
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition: 1st Edition
• Condition: Fine
• Dust Jacket Condition: Near Fine

About this title

Synopsis

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.

About the Author

JANE SMILEY is the author of eleven novels, including the Pulitzer Prize–winning A Thousand Acres, and three works of nonfiction. She was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2001. Smiley lives in Northern California.