"Prior to his vist to Ames, Iowa, Mauchly had been broadly interested in electrical analog calculating devices, but had not conceived an automatic electronic digital computer.
"As a result of this visit, the discussions of Mauchly with Atanasoff and Berry, the demonstrations, and the review of the manuscript, Mauchly derived from the ABC 'the invention of the automatic electronic digital computer' claimed in the ENIAC patent."
Goldstyne’s paper first described the possibility of programming digital computers to run different applications. Prior to that electronic computers were created one at a time to run specific applications, such as Turing’s code breaking app. The digital computer would never have gotten anywhere that way.