IEEE Conferences

Plenary Keynote

Wednesday July 5
9:25 - 10:35
Location: Regency Ballroom A/B
Session Chair: Carl K. Chang, Iowa State University

Presidential Opening Address

Jyotika Athavale, 2024 IEEE Computer Society President

Ten Persistent Myths about the Atanasoff-Berry Computer

History, including the history of computing, is always in danger of distortion by our very human love for legends. Legends are great fun, but they can be inaccurate in both positive and negative directions, making heroes of some individuals and villains of others. This talk attempts a more fact-based and technical look at one of the more emotion-prone chapters in computing history: the creation of the Atanasoff-Berry Computer (ABC) in the late 1930s and early 1940s, and its influence on the computers that came later.

Brief Biography

Prof. John L. Gustafson (www.johngustafson.net) is CTO of VQ Research and a Visiting Scholar at Arizona State University. He is the inventor of several novel forms of computer arithmetic first introduced in his 2015 book, The End of Error: Unum Computing. He is best known for his 1988 argument showing that parallel processing performance need not be limited by "Amdahl's law," now generally known as Gustafson's law. Previously, he has been Senior Fellow and Chief Product Architect at AMD and a Director of Intel Labs. He is a recipient of the inaugural Gordon Bell Prize and is a Golden Core member of IEEE.