This is an episode of REVOLUTIONARIES, a co-production of the Computer History Museum and KQED television, with major sponsorship by Intel. Recorded: January 27, 2011, originally broadcast on April 2, 2012

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 and the lives of other similarly burdened scientists easier. Then he went back and built the machine. It worked. The whole world changed.

Why don't we know the name of John Atanasoff as well as we know those of Alan Turing and John von Neumann? Atanasoff never secured a patent for his early device, and a number of the concepts he pioneered were incorporated into the breakthrough ENIAC computer that evolved into the legendary UNIVAC. But in 1973 a court declared that the patent on that Sperry Rand device was invalid, opening the intellectual property gates to the computer revolution.

Join Pulitzer Prize winning novelist Jane Smiley in a conversation with the Computer History Museum's John Hollar about the fascinating man who beat the world's greatest minds in the quest to develop the first true digital computing machine.

Watch the full lecture at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_inSe1EHrcU