The 1940s were a decade of dramatic events for the world. World War II changed the face of the world and
many lives forever. Although terrible atrocities were taking place during this period, it was also a time of innovation
and invention in computing. During the 1940s the first electronic computers were built, primarily to support the war.
Unfortunately the clouds of war make it difficult to determine exactly who invented the computer first.
Legally, at least in the United States, John Atanasoff is credited as being the inventor of the computer.
Atanasoff was a professor of mathematics and physics at Iowa State. Atanasoff was frustrated at the difficulty
his graduate students were having finding solutions to large systems of simultaneous algebraic equations for
solving differential equations. Like Babbage, almost 100 years earlier, Atanasoff believed that he could build a
machine to solve these equations.
Working with graduate student Clifford Berry, Atanasoff completed a prototype of his machine
near the end of 1939. Atanasoff and Berry sought simplicity in their computer. The Atanasoff??“Berry
8 INTRODUCTION TO COMPUTER SCIENCE [CHAP. 1
Figure 1-5 Hollerrith Tabulator & Sorter, photograph IBM Corporate Archives.
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