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or Paperback
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Links to books and other items on this page and elsewhere on Greg Ladens' blog may send you to Amazon, where I am a registered affiliate. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases, which helps to fund this site.
When he asked if we think they’re a bunch of hillbillies… I was really hoping he’d say statistical analysis shows Iowa is flatter than Nebraska.
Nice, well done.
Atanasoff did not “invent the computer,” or even invent the modern binary digital computer.
If anybody invented the digital computer, it was Babbage with his (mechanical) Analytical Engine. And then there was Alan Turing and Universal Turing machines. Both came well before Atanasoff.
Atanasoff’s ABC computer was digital, but it wasn’t the first digital computer, and it wasn’t general purpose, in either a practical or theoretical sense.
It was binary, but it wasn’t the first at that—Konrad Zuse’s computers were, IIRC, although the idea of using binary arithmetic for mechanized calculation was old by then. It also wasn’t a stored program computer (with the program stored conveniently in the same memory as regular data) like a modern computer. (The idea had been published by Zuse in Germany but his work wasn’t well-known in the English-speaking world, and we call such computers “von Neumann” machines because von Neumann wrote the first widely-read description of such things.)
After the ABC, there was Baby at Manchester, which was actually a proof-of-concept stored-program general-purpose universal digital computer—clearly “a computer” very much as we know it. (And then the Manchester Atlas, which was a practical version, commercialized as the Ferranti Atlas.)
Atansoff did some mighty fine inventing and engineering, but there are at least three or four better candidates for the invention/inventor(s) of “the computer.”
The ideas were mostly around and mostly inevitable, IMO. Once you put some smart people to work on mechanizing calculations, and give them electronics technology, pretty soon they’ll invent or reinvent binary von Neumann machines.