Clifford Berry
More info
- Born
- Died
- Known for
- Atanasoff-Berry Computer
- Nationality
- American
The graduate student who built the first electronic computing machine with his own hands, and died before a court ruled that it came first.
Berry was an electrical engineering student at Iowa State when John Atanasoff went looking, in 1939, for someone who could turn his sketches into actual electronics. He got a grant of 650 dollars and he got Berry, and Berry did the rest: the rotating drums of capacitors that served as memory, the add-subtract modules built from vacuum tubes, and the binary card reader. His 1941 master's thesis is effectively the machine's design document, which turned out to matter more than anything else he wrote.
The card reader was also the machine's weakness. It burned holes in the cards with electric arcs rather than punching them mechanically — fast, but with roughly one error per hundred thousand bits, which was enough that the large runs never completed. Berry took his doctorate in 1948, left the university for instrumentation work in California, and died in 1963 at the age of 45. Honeywell v. Sperry Rand, the trial that invalidated the ENIAC patent in 1973 and gave Atanasoff and Berry priority, opened four years after his death.