Interesting story of how Atanasoff came up the stroke of genius to design his computer the way he did.  He’d been thinking about it for a long time, convinced there had to be a way of doing math mechanically and thus save his PhD students at Iowa State College (now Iowa State University) in Ames, Iowa, from wasting time on math when they could be doing more interesting work in Physics.  One evening in the winter of 1937, the problem proved particularly taxing for him, so he did what he was accustomed to doing in situations such as this: he got into his car and drove at high speeds for several hours, thus effectively clearing his mind.  Eventually he crossed into the neighboring state of Illinois and stopped at a bar where he ordered a draft of liquid refreshment (bourbon).  This had a wondrous effect on his state of mind, enabling him to think with a calm clarity that led step-by-step to coherent conclusions about the design of his electronic digital computer.

Back at the lab, in the Spring of 1939, he hired Clifford Berry, an bright electrical engineering student, and together they invented the Atanasoff-Berry Computer, the ABC.  Within a year, the basic machine was completed and a paper written documenting its design.  The paper was forwarded to the university’s patent lawyer.  With World War II well underway, Atanasoff was given leave from the university to join the Naval Ordnance Laboratory for defense-related work.  Work on the ABC came to a halt.  The patent was never filed….