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

Jane Smiley (Author)

Book Description

Release date: October 19, 2010

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 that would make his life and the lives of other similarly burdened scientists easier. Then he went back and built the machine. It worked. The whole world changed.

Why don’t we know the name of John Atanasoff as well as we know those of Alan Turing and John von Neumann? Because he never patented the device, and because the developers of the far-better-known ENIAC almost certainly stole critical ideas from him. But in 1973 a court declared that the patent on that Sperry Rand device was invalid, opening the intellectual property gates to the computer revolution.

Jane Smiley tells the quintessentially American story of the child of immigrants John Atanasoff with technical clarity and narrative drive, making the race to develop digital computing as gripping as a real-life techno-thriller.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Novelist Smiley explores the story of the now mostly forgotten Atanasoff, a brilliant and engaged physicist and engineer who first dreamed of and built a computational machine that was the prototype for the computer. With her dazzling storytelling, 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. In 1936, Atanasoff and his colleague, A.E. Brandt, modified an IBM tabulator--which used punched cards to add or subtract values represented by the holes in the cards--to get it to perform in a better, faster, and more accurate way. One December evening in 1937, Atanasoff, still struggling to hit upon a formula that would allow a machine to replicate the human brain, drove from Ames, Iowa, to Rock Island, Ill., where, over a bourbon and soda in a roadside tavern, he sketched his ideas for a machine that would become the computer. As with many scientific discoveries or inventions, however, the original genius behind the innovation is often obscured by later, more aggressive, and savvy scientists who covet the honor for themselves. Smiley weaves the stories of other claimants to the computer throne (Turing and von Neumann, among others) into Atanasoff's narrative, throwing into relief his own achievements. (Oct.) (c)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

Several popular works have dealt with the question of who invented the computer, and novelist Smiley has obviously read and deeply pondered them all. She emerges from her immersion in binary arithmetic, vacuum tubes, and eccentric geniuses with a scintillating narrative synthesis that agrees with the prevailing technical opinion (Who Invented the Computer? by Alice Burks, 2003) that John Atanasoff, a mechanical fiddler extraordinaire, had the first computer functioning by 1941. But off the beaten path in Ames, Iowa, it attracted little notice after its builder diverted into war work, as did another physicist who had seen Atanasoff’s machine: John Mauchly, whose idea-sprouting indiscipline Smiley draws as vividly as she does Atanasoff’s cantankerous technical tenacity. Mauchly was central to the construction of ENIAC, once considered the first computer. Did he filch Atanasoff’s ideas, asked litigation in the 1970s? Before arriving at the courthouse, Smiley integrates into the story profiles of the computer theorists and builders of the 1940s, including Alan Turing, John von Neumann, and Konrad Zuse. Told with self-propelling fluidity, Smiley’s fine account will certainly draw more than the technophile base due to her literary cachet. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: This biography written by acclaimed novelist Jane Smiley is the first entry in Doubleday’s Great Innovators series. --Gilbert Taylor

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 256 pages
• Publisher: Doubleday; 1 edition (October 19, 2010)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0385527136
• ISBN-13: 978-0385527132
• Product Dimensions: 6.1 x 1.1 x 9.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 2.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (27 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #508,315 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

86 of 104 people found the following review helpful

1.0 out of 5 stars Disappointing effort November 21, 2010

By Jack FitzSimmons

Format:Hardcover

Jane Smiley's new book is a biography of John Atanasoff, The Man Who Invented the Computer. In this slim volume (219 pages), she attempts to present the life of Atanasoff as well as a number of other contemporaries, describe the machine that he built as well as several other computers, and explore the ENIAC patent trial in 1971. Such an undertaking requires an author with expertise in historical research, physics and electrical engineering, as well as patent law. Unfortunately, Ms. Smiley is an adept writer of fiction.
In addition to a description of Atanasoff's life, the author diffuses her limited effort by including a cast of characters, such as Alan Turing, Konrad Zuse, Thomas Flowers, John von Neumann, John Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert. The bibliography indicates that Ms. Smiley has relied on a remarkably limited number of exclusively secondary or lesser sources. The result is a derivative text that reads more like a college term paper than a serious historical effort.
Ms. Smiley's comprehension of science also appears to be quite limited. She describes quantum mechanics only as "...the science that predicts what happens in systems..." Why mention quantum mechanics at all if this is the best explanation that can be provided? Furthermore, she appears confused at times on the concepts of "analog" and "digital," and seems enamored of the novelty of the binary system, which was actually described more than two thousand years ago, and has been known in its modern form for the last 300 years.
Perhaps the most significant criticism is the lack of clear definition of the terms and concepts that form the basis of the work. The word "computer" has been used over the years to describe both human beings and a broad range of devices from the abacus and slide rule to the Cray Supercomputer. While these uses of the concept may be linked by a "family resemblance," a much more specific definition of the term must be employed if one uses the unique identifier: "the" computer. What are the key characteristics that made the ABC machine the significant break in history that led directly to the modern development of the computer? In fact, the machine that Smiley describes was a modest effort to address a single problem. While there were electronic components, it continued to need human input and control, limiting it to functioning at "human," rather than "electronic" speed. While Smiley states categorically that the machine "worked," this claim is hardly universally accepted. The intermediate storage mechanism was unreliable, and there were problems with both input and output devices. Even the replica made 30 years later fell far short of the identified goal of solving equations with 29 variables.
A critical question remains unaddressed: if the ABC represented a significant advance, a useful machine successfully solving a significant problem, why did no one else see its utility? Why did it sit collecting dust in a basement in Ames until it was eventually scrapped?
Ms. Smiley relies solely on the decision of Judge Larson in 1973 in her attempt to depose ENIAC from its generally acknowledged place as the first computer. She states simply that "...Sperry never appealed the decision, and so they must have accepted it." This is a simplistic and hopelessly naďve viewpoint. Legal decisions result from an adversarial system, where winning, not the ultimate truth, is the established goal. Judge Larson may have been a legal expert, but he knew nothing of the science the competing claims except what was presented in court, and various writers over the years have challenged how much of what was presented he read or understood. A better case than that will have to be presented to replace the first completely electronic, high speed, fully programmable multipurpose computer used successfully to compute firing tables and solve problems related to the hydrogen bomb with a questionably functional dust collector.
In short, this brief effort is no more than a rehash of previously advanced theories, devoid of original research or fresh insight. The advice to "write what you know" is an old cliché, which unfortunately was ignored in this case. Prolific authors occasionally write things that prove embarrassing and publishers sometimes print junk just because of the author's stature. Neither phenomenon is unique to this book, but both are evident. This book rightfully deserves an early trip to the remainder bin.

60 of 76 people found the following review helpful

1.0 out of 5 stars Well-written but terribly inaccurate November 21, 2010

By Evan Koblentz

Format:Hardcover

Jane Smiley, per her reputation as an acclaimed fiction writer, produced a book here that is a gripping tale to read. Unfortunately while she is a great fiction writer, she is absolutely not a historian. This is one of the worst history books I've read in a long time. There are several reasons:
- Her "scoop" is not a scoop at all. The debate of the ABC-vs.-ENIAC has been ongoing for many decades among historians of the computer industry
- Unlike a real historian, who would consider all the available evidence, the vast majority of Smiley's documented sources are "experts" from the university in Iowa -- where her main character of this story worked and studied. It's as if she wrote about the Yankees vs. Red Sox, and all her sources were from New York. Would the 'Sox get a fair shake?
- Smiley has little-to-no comprehension of computers. The ABC was an earlier binary calculating device than ENIAC, but so were dozens of other machines! (The binary issue is one of many mistakes on Smiley's part. She claims that Atanasoff INVENTED the binary machine. In fact, binary was in use for calculating devices decades prior.)
- Another reason the ABC was not a computer is because it had no decision-making capability. It required a human to manually tell it what to do with the results of each step in a math problem.
- Regardless of one's opinion of whether ABC was a "computer" or just a calculator, another problem is the ABC was merely electromachanical, not fully electronic. ABC uses vacuum tubes instead of relays to store its 0s and 1s, but other parts of the computer still uses mechanical equipment. It took ENIAC to be an all-electronic computer (not counting Colossus, because that was a single-purpose machine, vs. the debate here over general-purpose machines.)
- As for the issue of the court case and prior art -- does anyone really believe a judge in the early 1970s understood how computers worked from the 1930s and 1940s? The reasons he gave for deciding in favor of Honeywell had nothing to do with understanding who "invented" the computer. The issues were legal technicalities about how patents are filed.
- Another issue presented by Smiley is, "If the judge was so wrong, why didn't Remington appeal?" By the mid-1970s, with companies like DEC decimating the mainframe business, and with personal microcomputers about to bloom, what would have been the point of appealing ENIAC technology from 1945? Context is key!!!

Anyone interested in an objective view of this debate from real historians should visit their nearest university library and comb through back issues of the "IEEE Annals of the History of Computing" journal.

48 of 62 people found the following review helpful

1.0 out of 5 stars Offensive and off-base November 22, 2010

By D Moberg

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

As a person who has been involved with computers for 45 years, taught computer science, and is well versed in computer history, it was hard to get past the title and dust jacket of Ms. Smiley's book. Writing a biography of John Atanasoff is perhaps deserving as he was undoubtedly a brilliant and somewhat forgotten man, but calling the book "The Man Who Invented the Computer" is absurd. And portraying John Mauchly as a thief in her book (and as is now being propagated in other reviews based on Smiley's book) is extremely offensive. As an entrepreneur with my own patents and inventions that have sold worldwide, I know firsthand the value of actually building something that works as opposed to just coming up with ideas. In my mind, and in many others, the ENIAC is unquestionably the forerunner of modern day computers. This is not to discredit the work of those prior to ENIAC (as nicely illustrated in Smiley's book), but Eckert and Mauchly's perseverance and genius took developments in this field from scientific novelties to commercially available computing machines. This is was what was necessary to kick-start the birth of the modern-day computer industry...not another prototype in a basement.

Regarding the notorious Honeywell lawsuit by which Smiley asserts Mauchly stole Atanasoff's ideas, I assume everyone suddenly changed their mind about OJ Simpson the instant the court decided he was not guilty. The results of a court case are often neither scientific fact nor historical reality.

In summary, a biography of Atanasoff would be a welcome addition to the works in computer history, but to malign one of the true pioneers in the process, contrary to much of what is written in scholarly journals, is offensive.