Who invented the computer? For anyone who has made a pilgrimage to the University of Pennsylvania and seen the shrine to the ENIAC, the answer may seem obvious: John Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert Jr., who led Penn's engineering team in the 1940s. As it says on the plaque, the giant machine made of 17,468 vacuum tubes was the "first electronic large-scale, general-purpose digital computer." But notice all the qualifying adjectives. Does this mean there was a smaller digital computer that actually came first?

Yes, it does. And that computer was invented by John Vincent Atanasoff, who, with his partner Clifford Berry, started assembling the machine in the basement of the physics building at Iowa State University in the late 1930s. (It was finished in 1942.) Atanasoff, a physicist by training, was on the engineering faculty. Berry was a graduate student. Their computer, which was the size of a large desk, could do laborious mathematical calculations electronically using vacuum tubes to perform its logical operations. Now called the ABC (for Atanasoff-Berry computer), it was little known at the time. But it was admired by a small circle of brilliant inventors who were working on the problem of massive calculation, including John von Neumann at the Institute for Advanced Study and the engineers working on the ENIAC in Philadelphia.1

This fall, the unsung physicist is getting some of the credit he deserves from an unlikely author: Jane Smiley, the American novelist whose pastoral melodrama A Thousand Acres won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. She was captivated by the story and characters, "not for technical reasons as much as for narrative and psychological reasons." In The Man Who Invented the Computer, she paints a portrait of a prickly, relentless engineering savant who got hooked on the problem of automatic computation while working on his dissertation in quantum mechanics, which required tedious calculations. After building his computer, he went on to tackle a series of unrelated challenges during the early years of the cold war, including measuring the effects of nuclear test explosions. He founded his own firm, received several patents, and died wealthy and respected. But Atanasoff's greatest work, the first digital computer, was forgotten until the late 1960s, when a legal battle broke out over the patents that the ENIAC project leaders had filed on basic computing concepts.

In the course of the bruising litigation between the Sperry Rand Corporation, which had purchased the ENIAC patents, and Honeywell, which wanted to break them, it was proven that the ENIAC team stole key ideas from Atanasoff. The patents were declared invalid by a federal judge. But Atanasoff's achievement never became widely known or celebrated.

Although he remained largely forgotten on both coasts, the legal case made Atanasoff something of a hero in Iowa. At Iowa State, where Smiley studied and taught for more than two decades, she met someone who plays a minor, ignominious role in her tale: a professor who told her that, as a graduate student, he had been the one to dismantle and throw away the prototype of some strange calculating device that had been left behind in the basement of the physics building. The first digital computer was lost. "He ultimately went on to become the head of the computer science department," Smiley says, "and he told me that destroying that computer was one of the great regrets of his life." It is out of such personal twists and ironies—a novelist's materials—that Smiley builds her tale, capturing both Atanasoff's genius and, at the same time, the forces of chance that influence invention.

Wired: As a writer, most of your career has been dedicated to the novel. Why did you take on this biography?

Jane Smiley: I was asked by an editor to consider writing something about an American inventor. I asked him if he knew who invented the computer. He said he didn't. In that case, I told him, I should write a book about John Vincent Atanasoff.

Wired: We think of the ENIAC as the first computer. But what did the team that built it copy from Atanasoff?

Smiley: In 1937, Atanasoff came up with four principles that were new: electronic logic circuits that would function by turning on and off; binary enumeration; the use of capacitors, which were needed as a kind of memory; and digital operations, which used counting to perform calculations. The calculating machines of that time were like elaborate slide rules that used measurements to compute results, but Atanasoff, who was trained as a quantum physicist, understood that this would be very unwieldy for large numbers. He didn't want to measure, he wanted to count.

Wired: Atanasoff introduced the concept of digital calculation? Nobody else had considered this approach?

Smiley: Konrad Zuse, in Berlin, also did. Zuse built his first computer, the Z1, in his parents' apartment. But he never got to patent it, and he never got to have his ideas influence computing, because he was so far outside the mainstream, working in isolation in Nazi Germany.

Wired: Didn't Alan Turing, the great British mathematician, give the definitive description of a computer that proceeded by discrete steps?

Smiley: Turing was mainly a theoretician. He worked for the British government during the Second World War on the great code-breaking machine Colossus. But this also remained relatively unknown, because Churchill was obsessed with keeping it secret and ordered all the machines destroyed.

Wired: Atanasoff's computer was obscure, too. How did John Mauchly, who led the ENIAC team, learn about it?

Smiley: Atanasoff ran into Mauchly at the end of 1940 at a conference, and he invited Mauchly, who was at Ursinus College outside Philadelphia, to come have a look. Mauchly was there for four days. Atanasoff was like a proud papa who just had to show him every little thing. Mauchly went back to Philadelphia and began to study the problem of large-scale computing. Then the war came and Atanasoff went to work for the Navy; meanwhile, Mauchly got support for building the ENIAC. Every so often Mauchly would come over to the Naval Ordnance Lab in Maryland and find Atanasoff at his desk and chat him up. In February 1946, when ENIAC was completed and on display, Atanasoff was invited to look at it. It didn't look a thing like the ABC. For one thing, it was huge. Atanasoff believed that Mauchly had built an entirely different computer.

Wired: One of the reasons the ENIAC was so large is that it was a decimal machine. Atanasoff's computer was binary, which is much more efficient. But if Mauchly knew all about Atanasoff's computer, why didn't he use his best idea?

Smiley: Atanasoff understood binary enumeration, and this was not typical. His mother, who was trained as a mathematician, taught him different number systems when he was a boy. So it was only a fluke that Atanasoff was totally comfortable with binary systems.

Wired: What a strange story. You're telling me now that Mauchly, despite trying to steal Atanasoff's ideas, actually wasn't able to steal the best of them, because he didn't understand them.

Smiley: Keep in mind that they wanted to get the ENIAC going as fast as they could because of the war. The ENIAC was a kind of mishmash of all the things that they could put together as fast as possible. It didn't include binary enumeration, but it did use vacuum tubes and counting rather than measuring for calculation. Atanasoff's ideas were at the core of what Mauchly wanted to do, and his next successful computer, the Univac, was binary.

Wired: Why didn't Atanasoff patent his computer?

Smiley: He thought Iowa State was busily patenting it. They weren't.

Wired: Why not?

Smiley: Atanasoff was an irritable, frank guy who was a little hard to get along with. Also, the outside people they brought in were all involved in analog computing. They didn't think that the future was in electronic computing.

Wired: So in the end it was junked?

Smiley: When he and Berry built the machine, they made it 36 inches wide so it could fit through a doorway. But they didn't include the doorjambs in their measurements, so it was actually about three quarters of an inch too wide. The computer was trapped. A guy named Robert Stewart, a physics graduate student, was told he could use the extra office space if he would dismantle the machine. And so he did.

Wired: There was controversy in the patent suit over whether Atanasoff's machine had ever been fully functional. I understand that at some point it was reconstructed from original plans and photos.

Smiley: Yes, the computer was re-created in the '90s by John Gustafson, who now works for Intel. And it worked.

Wired: To me, John Mauchly remains something of a mystery. Here you've got a guy you describe as a faker, a thief of other people's ideas, a big talker. The other names that are in your story, they are some of the smartest people of their generation. Why wasn't Mauchly found out?

Smiley: He was found out. People tried to push him aside. Mauchly's partner, J. Presper Eckert Jr., was the lead engineer on the ENIAC. When John von Neumann wanted Eckert to come to Princeton, he didn't invite Mauchly. IBM also offered Eckert a job and not Mauchly. This kind of thing was constant.

Wired: After the war, Mauchly and Eckert got a series of patents covering basic computing concepts. How could this happen? Atanasoff was still alive and well connected.

Smiley: Atanasoff was busy. He was working on other projects. He had moved on.

Wired: How did von Neumann hear about the ENIAC project?

Smiley: In 1944, he was approached by a mathematician named Herman Goldstine—the Army liaison to the ENIAC project. Goldstine brought von Neumann over to see the computer, and von Neumann understood immediately what they were trying to do. In June of '45, von Neumann and Goldstine collaborated on a description of the ENIAC. They said that it was supposed to be an internal document, but Goldstine sent it to hundreds of people. They didn't put Mauchly's name on it anywhere.

Wired: So von Neumann stole the ideas that Mauchly stole from Atanasoff?

Smiley: Nobody knows what von Neumann's real goal was.

Wired: But you speculate that he was intentionally trying to put the idea of the computer into the public domain. And if that was his goal, it worked. When the patent conflict over the ENIAC got into court in the 1960s, von Neumann's early description, along with Atanasoff's testimony about his ABC prototype, were among the things that convinced the judge that Mauchly's patents should not stand.

Smiley: Von Neumann was a smart guy. I think he would have said that the computer was a team effort, just like the bomb. Why should Mauchly get the patent?

Wired: Did von Neumann know Atanasoff?

Smiley: Yes. He visited him and talked with him, and my speculation is that von Neumann realized that Mauchly owed ideas to Atanasoff.

Wired: Perhaps von Neumann believed that the computer was too big an idea to be patented.

Smiley: I think that's what he did conclude.

Wired: Did von Neumann himself file any patents on computer technology?

Smiley: No. He never did.

Wired: Atanasoff comes off as very thoughtful and careful. Did he ever do anything reckless?

Smiley: My take on Atanasoff is that he was a pain in the ass. I think he was the kind of person who is so directed and determined that you want to run the other direction after about two days. There are many inventors whose personal life is just subsumed into their projects. That's Atanasoff. That's why he had a happy life: not because he was or wasn't recognized, but because the things he built turned out to be what he thought they were going to be.

Contributing editor Gary Wolf (gary@aether.com) interviewed investor Peter Thiel in issue 18.02.

Note 1. Correction appended [4:12 p.m./Nov. 10 2010]: John von Neumann worked at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J., not at Princeton University, as this story previously implied.