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It started when Jessica relayed something that happened when she was on a cultural walking tour of Sofia two weekends ago. The tour guide asked “Does anyone know who invented the computer?”

Alan Turing? Charles Babbage?

The tour guided pointed to a statue and said, “John Atanasoff.”

I had never heard of him. So of course I looked him up. That led me down the most incredible rabbit hole as I uncovered a courtroom drama filled with invalidated patents and mountains of court records.

Why had I never heard about this? It was eclipsed by a bigger legal drama: Watergate.

Have you published a response to this? :

Previously on this day

10 years ago I wrote June

There is nothing in this world more bitter than Spring.

11 years ago I wrote The Death and Life of Geocities

Geocities is no longer here for you to use.

12 years ago I wrote Loosely joined

What to do with those small pieces.

15 years ago I wrote Possible Amazon redesign in the pipeline

It looks like I’ve been chosen as a guinea pig for a design that Amazon is considering. Changes like these are usually served up on a small subset of Amazon’s servers. It’s then delivered to a correspondingly small subset of visitors.

15 years ago I wrote Introducing Adactio Elsewhere

I mentioned a little while back that there seems to be more and more bits of me scattered around the internet. My photos are on Flickr, my wishlist is on Amazon, my links are on Del.icio.us and my events are on Upcoming.

18 years ago I wrote NRA Takes Credit for Bush's Win

This report on the NRA’s 131st annual meeting sounds like something from The Onion.