Alice Burks (née Rowe, August 20, 1920 – November 21, 2017) was an American author of children's books and books about the history of electronic computers.
Burks retired from full-time employment after marrying Moore School lecturer Dr. Arthur Burks, a mathematician who served as one of the principal engineers in the construction of the ENIAC, the world's first general-purpose electronic digital computer, built at the Moore School between 1943 and 1946. Unlike some of the Moore School women computers, she never worked directly with the ENIAC.
Starting in the 1970s following the decision of Honeywell v. Sperry Rand, the federal court case that invalidated the ENIAC patent, she and husband Arthur championed the work of John Vincent Atanasoff, the Iowa State College physics professor whom the court had ruled invented the first electronic digital computer (a machine that came to be called the Atanasoff–Berry Computer) and from whom the subject matter of the ENIAC was ruled to be derived. In articles and two books, the first co-authored with Arthur, Mrs. Burks sought to bolster the judge's decision and highlight testimony and evidence from the case. This pitted the Burkses in a deeply acrimonious controversy against exponents of ENIAC inventors John Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert.
Burks later lived in Ann Arbor, Michigan, where she was assisting her husband Arthur Burks with writing his memoirs and preparing his papers for university donation. Arthur died on May 14, 2008.[1] Burks died in November 2017 at the age of 97.[2]
