Engineers
John Atanasoff
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John Atanasoff was an American physicist at Iowa State College who, with his graduate student Clifford Berry, built the Atanasoff-Berry Computer between 1939 and 1942, the first machine to compute electronically using vacuum tubes and binary numbers. The machine was limited to solving systems of linear equations and was never patented or fully perfected, but a 1973 federal court ruling credited it as the true origin of the electronic digital computer, over the later, patented ENIAC.
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The Computer, Inventions Why this is disputed. A 1973 federal court, Honeywell v. Sperry Rand, found ENIAC's patented design derived from the Atanasoff-Berry Computer and invalidated the ENIAC patent, crediting Atanasoff with the electronic digital computer's true origin even though his own machine was never general purpose or patented.
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