The Mystery of Claude Shannon’s Personal Computer

Abstract

Claude Shannon is renowned for his master’s thesis in which he applied George Boole’s binary logic to electrical switching networks, establishing the mathematical basis for digital circuit design. Far less publicized is his contribution to the innovation of a personal digital computer some 20 years later. Between 1954 and 1961, while working at AT&T’s Bell Telephone Laboratories and teaching at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he designed and built an embodiment of a programmable, digital switching network of electromechanical relays and licensed its techniques to two entrepreneurs, Edmund Berkeley and Oliver Garfield, for sale as a home computer. The GENIAC, BRAINIAC, and MINIVAC represented iterations of Shannon’s work at Bell Labs and sowed interest in digital computing with young people in the United States and in parts of Europe, well over ten years before electronic digital computers equipped with microprocessors reached a much bigger audience.