John Vincent Atanasoff OCM (October 4, 1903 – June 15, 1995) was an American physicist and inventor credited with inventing the first electronic digital computer.

[6] Atanasoff's father, Ivan Atanasov, was of Bulgarian origin, born in 1876 in the village of Boyadzhik, close to Yambol, then in the Ottoman Empire.

John's father later became an electrical engineer, whereas his mother, Iva Lucena Purdy (of mixed French and Irish ancestry), was a teacher of mathematics.

Young Atanasoff's ambitions and intellectual pursuits were in part influenced by his parents, whose interests in the natural and applied sciences cultivated in him a sense of critical curiosity and confidence.

[citation needed] Partly due to the drudgery of using the mechanical Monroe calculator, which was the best tool available to him while he was writing his doctoral thesis, Atanasoff began to search for faster methods of computation.

With a grant of $650 received in September 1939 and the assistance of his graduate student Clifford Berry, the Atanasoff–Berry Computer (ABC) was prototyped by November of that year.

The key ideas employed in the ABC included binary math and Boolean logic to solve up to 29 simultaneous linear equations.

[6] By the time he returned from the testing the NOL computer project was shut down due to lack of progress, again on the advice of von Neumann.

Atanasoff agreed to assist the attorney, but IBM ultimately entered a patent-sharing agreement with Sperry Rand, the owners of the Eckert–Mauchly memory patent, and the case was dropped.

In that case's decision, Judge Earl R. Larson found that "Eckert and Mauchly did not themselves first invent the automatic electronic digital computer, but instead derived that subject matter from one Dr. John Vincent Atanasoff".

In the 1973 decision of Honeywell v. Sperry Rand, a federal judge named Atanasoff the inventor of the electronic digital computer.

Following World War II Atanasoff remained with the government and developed specialized seismographs and microbarographs for long-range explosive detection.