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Cargando... The Man Who Invented the Computer: The Biography of John Atanasoff, Digital Pioneerpor Jane Smiley
   Ninguno Actualmente no hay Conversaciones sobre este libro.  GeoffSC | Jul 25, 2020 |   The main reason early pioneers of the computer even built computing machines was to reduce the number of tedious calculations required in higher mathematics. For the case of John Vincent Atanasoff, it was for his Doctoral Thesis. He had to calculate using mechanical calculators that couldn't multiply or divide. I couldn't imagine putting up with something like that, but Atanasoff did one better and figured he would build his own. So after he got his doctorate he looked into building his own computing device. Zuse had a different background in that he was more into art, but he built computers for the same reason. It seems a lot of companies like IBM were trapped in the idea that Binary wouldn't work or would be too complicated. This was why early calculators were so primitive and unusable. This book was pretty interesting, and it did tell me some stuff I didn't know. (  ) Floyd3345 | Jun 15, 2019 |  ) lunamelt | Jan 10, 2016 |  ) KirkLowery | Mar 4, 2014 | This is more the early cross-pollination that led to computers rather than the biography of a single man; the title is misleading but the book is interesting so that's okay. ( ) ljhliesl | Jun 1, 2013 |
 "The narrative shuffles painstakingly along; reading it is like watching a very old man pack for vacation. The characters feel morally and intellectually uninhabited, lighted from without rather than within. The scientific developments at the heart of modern life are never satisfactorily explained (except in the wonderfully lucid appendices). Despite its tantalizing material, “The Man Who Invented the Computer” ultimately offers both too little computer and too little man. "  Neither Steve Jobs nor Bill Gates invented the computer, despite the impressions they tend to leave. The guy with the best claim to making the first "automatic electronic digital computer" was John Atanasoff, a young associate professor of physics at Iowa State College. So why isn't Atanasoff as famous as Gates or Jobs or even his contemporary, Alan Turing? As novelist Jane Smiley (A Thousand Acres, Moo) explains in her biography of Atanasoff, The Man Who Invented the Computer, Iowa State didn't really grasp what he had wrought: "His ideas were so advanced that he had to prove they were worth something to people who did not really understand them." The inventor didn't always play nice with others, and World War II, though an enormous stimulus to computer development, got in the way of both patent processes and scientific information sharing. Atanasoff, who earned a doctorate in theoretical physics from the University of Wisconsin in 1930, began working on a calculating machine because, Smiley writes, "He saw over and over again that all scientific and engineering progress would be retarded until some sort of breakthrough in methods of calculation." Smiley describes him as a classic American innovator, inquisitive, practical and hands-on. By 1938, he had worked out the basic principles of his machine, and it was operational by mid 1940. Atanasoff's invention was a milestone, but also only a stepping-stone to the personal computers we depend on today. Some passages of Smiley's bio are challenging simply because the topics, mathematical and mechanical, require effort to grasp, but her writing is clear and crisp. She finds plenty of drama and personality along the way: "There was no inventor of the computer who was not a vivid personality, and no two are alike." Whether this was a labor of love or a bread-and-butter job for the eclectic Smiley, readers can be grateful she used her intelligence and narrative skills for this story.
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 easier. Then he went back and built the machine. It worked, but he never patented the device, and 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 gates to the computer revolution. Biographer Jane Smiley makes the race to develop digital computing as gripping as a real-life techno-thriller.--From publisher description. No se han encontrado descripciones de biblioteca. |
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 Google Books — Cargando...GénerosSistema Decimal Melvil (DDC)004.092Information Computing and Information Computer science Computer science -- subdivisions History, geographic treatment, biography BiographyClasificación de la Biblioteca del CongresoValoraciónPromedio: (3.4)
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John Atanasoff certainly appears to have been the first to get a computer going in the USA, neck and neck with Konrad Zeus in Germany. But he is visited by John Mauchly who understands more than John realises. With WWII intervening and patients not being file, it is only resolved years later in 1973 that John Atanasoff ideas had been used in the UNIVAC. The book runs out of steam at the end getting too involved with the patent dispute and court case. (