The Father of the Modern Computer

John Vincent Atanasoff had a problem. The year was 1937 and Atanasoff, a professor of mathematics and physics at Iowa State University, needed to find a better way to help his college stud­ents solve long, complex math problems called simultaneous differential equations. "We needed practical solutions for practical purposes," he recalls. For Atanasoff and his students, that meant getting more accurate answers and getting them more quickly.

Wrestling with the problem kept him working in his lab, many times until three or four in the morning. "Tormented" is the way he described himself. Driving helped him work out problems. One night he drove 200 miles before stopping at a roadhouse to rest. "I realized that I was no longer so nervous and my thoughts turned again to computing machines. Now I don't know why my mind worked then when it had not worked previously, but things seemed to be good and cool and quiet. During this evening ... I generated within my mind the possibility of regenerative memory . . . and I gained an initial concept of what is called today the 'logic circuits.'" The concept for the computer was emerging. Working with a modest grant of $650 from the college, Atanasoff began designing his computer. With help from his graduate assistant, Clifford Berry, the first prototype of the Atanasoff Berry Computer, or ABC, was completed in 1939. Atanasoff was quick to realize that vacuum tubes, although subject to failure, were more reliable than mechanical relays. He also developed some of the essential concepts that would be incorporated into future computers, including using binary mathematics over the decimal system. The combination of vacuum tubes and binary mathematics made the ABC an electronic, digital computer.

Atanasoff never permitted a commercial version of the ABC to be built, mainly because the two companies to whom he showed it—IBM and Remington Rand (which went on to develop the UNIVAC) —asked him to sign away all his inventor's rights. In a letter to Remington Rand, Atanasoff wrote, "This procedure would furnish your company with all of my information without any corresponding obligation on your part. ..."

In 1942, Dr. Atanasoff was requested to accept employment with the Naval Ordnance Laboratory in Washington, D.C. He left the details of the patenting process in the hands of Iowa State officials and a patent lawyer. To his chagrin, and despite periodic inquiries, the patent applications were never filed. Even so, the ABC became the prototype of the first large-scale programmable electronic computer, ENIAC. Patents granted to ENIAC, constructed at the University of Pennsylvania under a U.S. Army contract between 1943 and 1946, were invalidated by an unchallenged U.S. District Court decision in 1973. The court found that basic electronic digital computer concepts in ENIAC were "derived from one Dr. John Vincent Atanasoff."

Yet true and formal recognition of Atanasoff's contribution was not made until 1990, when President George Bush presented him with a National Medal of Technology at a White House ceremony. Atanasoff, the program for the ceremony read, was being honored "for his invention of the electronic digital computer." At 87 years of age, John Atanasoff was finally recognized as the father of the modern computer.