The World's First Electronic Computer

The world's first electronic digital computer was developed not at MIT or Bell Labs, but in a basement at Iowa State University. Between 1937 and 1942, physics professor John Atanasoff and graduate student Clifford Berry built the Atanasoff-Berry Computer, or ABC, which introduced the binary number system and electronic circuits that form the basis of every computer operating today. The invention went largely unrecognized for decades until a landmark 1973 federal court ruling officially credited Atanasoff as the inventor of the electronic digital computer.

Source: Wikipedia