The first special-purpose electronic computer may actually have been invented by Professor John Vincent Atanasoff, a physicist and mathematician at Iowa State College (now Iowa State University), during 1937–42. Atanasoff and graduate student Clifford Berry built a successful small prototype for the purpose of testing two ideas:
- capacitors to store data in binary form and
- electronic logic circuits to perform addition and subtraction.
In 1939, after successfully demonstrating the proof-of-concept prototype, Atanasoff-Berry receive funds to build a full-scale machine. Various components of the Atanasoff-Berry Computer (ABC) were designed and built from 1939 to 1942, but development was discontinued at the onset of World War II. On 14 August 1940, John Atanasoff finishes a paper describing the ABC. The computer was designed to solve simultaneous linear equations The ABC featured about 300 vacuum tubes for control and arithmetic calculations, use of binary numbers, logic operations (instead of direct counting), memory capacitors, and punched cards as input/output units.
Atanasoff was only able to claim credit for this paper and the title of inventor of the electronic digital computer after a long court battle that ended in 1972. The case - was initiated on a charge by Honeywell Inc. that Sperry Rand. Corp. had enforced a fraudulent patent - involved lengthy testimony by Atanasoff and ENIAC inventors Presper Eckert and John Mauchly, who held the patent under review. A judge's ruling that Atanasoff was the true inventor led to the invalidation of the ENIAC patent.
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