John Atanasoff was a pioneer in the field of computer science. In the late 1930s, while teaching at Iowa State University, he designed and built an electronic computing machine with one of his graduate students, Clifford Berry. The Atanasoff-Berry Computer (ABC) was probably the first machine to use vacuum tubes to perform its calculations. Although he abandoned his work on the ABC to do war work during World War II, Atanasoff became involved with computers again in 1971 when a suit was filed by Sperry Rand, which held the patent of the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer (ENIAC) built during the War, against Honeywell.

John Vincent Atanasoff was born on October 4, 1903, in Hamilton, New York, the son of Ivan (John) Atanasoff, a Bulgarian immigrant who worked as a mining engineer, and an American mother, a teacher. Atanasoff became interested in calculating devices at an early age--he began studying his...