The inventor of the first computer - John Atanasoff Jr. talks about his father's legacy

"It was an all-consuming effort," recalled John Atanasoff Jr., who was just 5 when his father was inventing the computer. The younger Atanasoff (now 77), was a CEO of a Colorado medical devices company.

John Vincent Atanasoff (ataˈnasɔf; October 4, 1903 -- June 15, 1995) was an American physicist and inventor. The 1973 decision of the patent suit Honeywell v. Sperry Rand named him the inventor of the first automatic electronic digital computer. His special-purpose machine has come to be called the Atanasoff--Berry Computer.
The son of a Bulgarian immigrant who became an electrical engineer, Atanasoff held positions as a teaching professor, a governmental wartime research director, and a corporate research executive before being recognized in the 1970s and 1980s for digital electronic computer research he conducted at Iowa State College in the late 1930s and early 1940s.

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Vincent_Atanasoff