John Atanasoff (1903 - 1995)

Clifford Berry (1916 - 1963)

"I have always taken the position that there is enough credit for everyone in the invention and development of the electronic computer" - John Atanasoff

In 1942, John Atanasoff, a mathematical genius, and Clifford Berry, a brilliant electrician developed what they called the Atanasoff-Berry Computer. This later became known as simply the ABC .

The ABC brought many innovations to the computing world including:

1. a binary system of arithmetic
2. parallel processing
3. regenerative memory
4. separation of memory and computing functions

One interesting advance the ABC made was that it used dynamic storage for its main memory, which is also used by today's dynamic RAM chips.