Berry, Clifford E.
Clifford E. Berry (1918 - 1963), an American computer scientist and co-creator of the first digital electronic computer in 1939. As a graduate student at Iowa State University working with Professor John Astanoff, Berry helped build the world's first electronic-digital computer. The Atanasoff-Berry Computer took over two years to complete and weighed more than seven hundred pounds (320 kg). It contained approximately 1 mile (1.6 km) of wire, 280 dual-triode vacuum tubes, and 31 thyratrons (a type of triode gas-filled tube). The finished computer was about the size of a desk. The Atanasoff-Berry Computer represented several innovations in computing, including a binary system of arithmetic, parallel processing, regenerative memory, and a separation of memory and computing functions.
Further Reading
Berry and Astanoff Biographies (Iowa State University-Scalable Computing Laboratory)
Rebuilding the ABC: 60 years of ditigal computing (Scalable Computing Laboratory)
