What Happened on October 19th

John Vincent Atanasoff emerges as victor from a protracted US legal battle for the title of the inventor of the electronic digital computer. A judge determined his work had preceded and contributed to development of the ENIAC machine, whose inventors had previously been credited.

The National Bureau of Standards authorized construction of its Standards Western Automatic Computer. The machine, which would be built at the Institute for Numerical Analysis in Los Angeles, had an objective to compute using already-developed technology. This was in contrast to the machine’s cousin, the Standards Eastern Automatic Computer, which tested components and systems for computer standards.