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The Man Who Invented the Computer
by Jane Smiley
New Book shelf QA 76.2 A75 S64 2010

Novelist Jane Smiley explores the story of the now mostly forgotten John Atanasoff, a brilliant and engaged physicist and engineer who first dreamed of and built a computational machine that was the prototype for the computer. Smiley narrates the tale of a driven young Iowa State University physics professor searching for a way to improve the speed and accuracy of mathematical calculations.

One night the young physics professor got up from his dining room table and went for a drive along the Iowa back roads. "I was in such a mental state," he recalled dramatically, "that no resolution was possible." When he crossed into Illinois, though, Atanasoff spotted a roadside tavern. He went inside, ordered a bourbon and soda, took a sip, and then, the moment he'd waited for his entire life revealed itself. The design of the world's first working computer flashed before his eyes. He jotted down the plan on a cocktail napkin. It was 1937

While earning his PhD at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, Atanasoff became sick of using a Monroe calculator--a typewriter-like device whose power was limited to solving simple equations. After landing a job teaching quantum mechanics at Iowa State University, he tinkered with existing calculators, including one created by IBM, to make them more powerful. With a graduate student named Clifford Berry and a $650 grant, he built a prototype of his computer, the ABC, in 1940. The book integrates into the story profiles of the computer theorists and builders
of the 1940s, including Alan Turing, John von Neumann, and Konrad Zuse.

Check out, "The Man Who Invented the Computer" available now in the library on the New Book Shelf New Book Shelf QA 76.2 A75 S64 2010