Man Who Invented the Computer by Smiley, Jane instant download

Man Who Invented the Computer by Smiley, Jane instant download

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.