In 1988 he wrote a biography of John Vincent Atanasoff, the Iowa State College professor who invented the first electronic digital computer in 1939.
Do not get this Iowa State machine confused with the Atanasoff–Berry Computer of the late 1930s- Neither John Vincent Atanasoff nor Clifford Berry worked on this machine.
His two-volume monograph on the solution of linear differential and integral equations by the method of moments was translated circa 1938-1942 by John Vincent Atanasoff who found this work useful in his computer-project (Atanasoff–Berry Computer).
John Vincent Atanasoff, Bulgarian-American inventor, created the first binary computer, Atanasoff–Berry Computer, writing the concept in 1937 on a cocktail napkin after having a few glasses of scotch whiskey.
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Decades later, Burks and his wife Alice Burks outlined their case for the subject matter of the ENIAC having been derived from John Vincent Atanasoff.
The Man Who Invented the Computer is a 2010 historical biography by author Jane Smiley about American physicist John Vincent Atanasoff and the invention of the computer.