09/09/2026
The Wednesday, 9 September MAARC Facebook post provides a little history on computers that you may not have heard. Sort of like what radio newscaster Paul Harvey used to address as 'the rest of the story.' It comes to us from the "Wonders You've Unseen and Unread" page.
"John Atanasoff was a physics professor in Ames, Iowa. Clifford Berry was his twenty-one-year-old graduate student. They worked in the basement of the physics building at Iowa State College.
It was the fall of 1939. The room smelled of hot soldering irons and ozone. They were trying to solve linear equations faster than a mechanical calculator could turn its gears.
At the time, solving twenty-nine linear equations took a trained mathematician hundreds of hours. They sat at desks with heavy Monroe calculators, turning cranks and writing down partial results. One mistake meant starting over. If they failed to find a faster method, the department’s research would remain stalled by months of manual arithmetic. Atanasoff needed a machine that didn't rely on moving parts. He needed something that counted with electricity. They built a frame out of angle iron. They wired three hundred vacuum tubes to a rotating drum.
By December, the prototype was finished. They called it the Atanasoff-Berry Computer. It didn't look like a machine that mattered. It was the size of a desk, covered in exposed wires, and weighed seven hundred pounds. But it worked. It processed math using electrical charges. It used binary logic—ones and zeros—to hold memory. Berry designed a system to burn small holes into paper cards using high voltage, recording the data so the machine could read it back. No one had ever done this before.
Atanasoff was brilliant but restless. He had a habit of driving his Ford V8 at eighty miles an hour on dirt roads when a math problem frustrated him. He would stop at roadhouses in Illinois, drink a single bourbon, and draft schematics on cocktail napkins.
At the time, the United States Patent Office required physical models for computing machines. Conceptual diagrams were not enough. A university filing an application in 1941 was expected to pay the $300 patent fee upfront and provide working schematics. Most academic institutions viewed experimental electronic calculators as a poor financial investment, preferring the established mechanical models built by IBM.
In June 1941, a physicist named John Mauchly traveled to Ames, Iowa. He wanted to see the machine. Mauchly stayed for five days. He slept on Atanasoff’s couch. He stood in the basement, asked detailed questions about the vacuum tube logic circuits, and read the fifty-page manual Atanasoff had written. Atanasoff, trusting another academic, held nothing back.
Six months later, the United States entered World War II. Atanasoff left Iowa to do acoustics research for the Navy. Berry took a defense job in California. The college needed the basement space. They dismantled the computer. The vacuum tubes were boxed up. The metal frame was scrapped.
In February 1946, the U.S. War Department unveiled the ENIAC. It was hailed as the world’s first electronic computer. The newspaper photographs featured John Mauchly. The patent application carried his name. Atanasoff read about the machine in a magazine. The core architecture was his.
The computer industry exploded. By the 1960s, it was generating billions of dollars.
The Sperry Rand corporation acquired the ENIAC patent. They used it to demand royalties from every technology company in the world. If you built a computer, you had to pay them. John Atanasoff was running a small engineering firm. Clifford Berry had died in 1963, his name completely absent from the history of computing.
In 1967, lawyers for the Honeywell corporation knocked on Atanasoff’s door. They were refusing to pay Sperry Rand’s royalties. They needed him to testify in federal court to invalidate the ENIAC patent.
The ENIAC patent trial began in 1971. It was officially docketed as Honeywell v. Sperry Rand in the U.S. District Court for the District of Minnesota. Atanasoff took the stand. He was sixty-eight years old. Mauchly had the patent. The press clippings. The military contracts. The financial backing of the United States government. Atanasoff had old letters and a copy of the manual Mauchly had read thirty years earlier.
The trial lasted 135 days. Seventy-seven witnesses testified. The court examined eighty physical exhibits. The Honeywell attorneys spent years building the case. They deposed dozens of engineers. They dug through military archives. They found the original train ticket Mauchly used to travel to Ames, Iowa. The Sperry Rand lawyers fought aggressively. They tried to prove the Atanasoff-Berry Computer was just a concept, a broken prototype that never truly functioned. Atanasoff sat quietly on the stand. He explained his circuits. He explained the binary logic. He pointed to the exact pages in the manual he had written in 1940.
During the proceedings, the true reason Atanasoff lost control of his invention surfaced. In 1941, Iowa State's patent lawyer, Richard Trexler, simply forgot to file the paperwork. He decided the machine lacked commercial value. He wanted to save the college the $300 filing fee. The application sat in a drawer until it expired.
Mauchly testified that he had invented the concepts independently. He claimed the five days he spent studying Atanasoff’s machine in 1941 had no bearing on the ENIAC. On October 19, 1973, Federal Judge Earl R. Larson issued his ruling. It was 248 pages long. The ENIAC patent was declared invalid. The judge wrote that John Mauchly "did not himself first invent the automatic electronic digital computer, but instead derived that subject matter from one Dr. John Vincent Atanasoff."
It was a Friday. The next day, the Watergate scandal reached a boiling point with the Saturday Night Massacre. The American press ignored the trial. The ruling that redirected the entire technology industry was buried on the back pages of a few regional newspapers. Sperry Rand did not appeal. The royalties stopped.
Atanasoff was never compensated for the invention. He received no stock, no settlement, and no back pay. His name was simply entered into the court record as a matter of historical fact. Today, billions of microchips process data using the exact binary logic wired together in that Ames basement. The building on the Iowa State campus is still there. The basement floor is concrete. A bronze plaque hangs near the stairwell, listing two names most people walk past without reading. John Atanasoff and Clifford Berry: the men who wired the future and lost the patent.
Source: Court records of Honeywell v. Sperry Rand, U.S. District Court, 1973.
Verified via: The Atanasoff-Berry Computer Archive, Iowa State University.
