For a fifth consecutive year, President Georgi Purvanov bestowed the John Atanasoff award during a ceremony at the presidency on October 3 2008. The award is given for extraordinary achievements of Bulgarian computer scientists.

This year's winner is Petar Petrov, who was born in 1974 in Veliko Turnovo and in 1998 graduated from Sofia University with a degree from the mathematics and computer science department. In 2004, Petrov completed his PhD at University of California at San Diego and that same year he started work as tenured professor at University of Maryland at College Park.
 
Petrov is the author of 48 scientific publications that have found place on the pages of prestigious field-related magazines. He works in the field of low-energy micro-architectural organisations, systems algorithms for access to cache memory, configuration architecture and related operational systems.

A certificate for special contribution to the information society was presented to Tseno Galchev. The 26-year-old professional earned his graduate and undergraduate degrees in electrical engineering and computer science at University of Michigan. Since 2007,Galchev guides two student research teams and has published six research papers. His work is on transforming kinetic energy, such as vibrations, into electrical power.

For a first time this year certificate for special achievements was given to highs school students – Alexander Kolarski from the town of Montana and Roumen Hristov from Shoumen.

First given in 2003, the award commemorates the name of John Vincent Atanasoff, whose father was a Bulgarian immigrant. Atanasoff was born on October 4 1903 in Hamilton, New York, and it has been accepted that he, with the assistance of his graduate student Clifford Berry, invented the first automatic electronic digital computer known as the Atanasoff-Berry computer. Atanasoff conducted extensive research in the late 1930s and early 1940s at the Iowa State College, but the devise was recognized in 1973 after a court decision following the patent suit Honeywell v. Sperry Rand.