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

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 tha...