Man Who Invented the Computer

✍ Scribed by Smiley, Jane

• Book ID: 108376920
• Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
• Year: 2010
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 875 KB
• Category: Fiction
• ISBN-13: 9780385533720

✦ Synopsis

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.