Sure looks "mini", huh? But we're getting ahead of our story.
One of the earliest attempts to build an all-electronic (that is, no gears, cams, belts, shafts, etc.) digital computer occurred in 1937 by J. V. Atanasoff, a professor of physics and mathematics at Iowa State University. By 1941 he and his graduate student, Clifford Berry, had succeeded in building a machine that could solve 29 simultaneous equations with 29 unknowns. This machine was the first to store data as a charge on a capacitor, which is how today's computers store information in their main memory (DRAM or dynamic RAM). As far as its inventors were aware, it was also the first to employ binary arithmetic. However, the machine was not programmable, it lacked a conditional branch, its design was appropriate for only one type of mathematical problem, and it was not further pursued after World War II. It's inventors didn't even bother to preserve the machine and it was dismantled by those who moved into the room where it lay abandoned.
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