Who invented the computer?

  • In 1837, Charles Babbage designed a general purpose computer, the Analytical Engine, but never built it.
  • Between 1934 and 1937, Church, Turing et al. defined the general purpose computer, but didn’t design one.
  • In 1941, Konrad Zuse built the first general purpose computer, the Z3, but didn’t know it was general purpose and didn’t use it that way.
  • From 1943 to 1946, Mauchly and Eckert finally built a computer, ENIAC, that was designed to be general-purpose.

18 thoughts on “Who invented the computer?”

  1. Don’t forget Wilhelm Schickard who designed one of the first mechanical calculators in 1623. Our University’s CS department is named after him ;-)

  2. I do not think that Colossus can be seen as a Computer (turing complete), due the Nature of it’s purpose of “brute-force” code hacking.
    Enigma can be seen as a LFSR with 25 states, with a Dynamic changing modulo (distance) which permuated constant on same starting key wich each typing.
    Fatally Enigma had a Reflection disc, which made it attackable
    This is what Colossus Tried to do: It tried to find matching pairs on daily (constant key sequence) transmitted message , which was then used for calculating back the Disk position and this lead to the decryption of all daily messages

    if you assume: 3 Disks, starting at AAA
    then
    AAAA -> YBDR
    BBBB -> OAJY
    AB on same position –> that’s the reflection disk
    The chanche that this happens is on a 3 Disk system 1:25

    and if fatally, in a long sequence
    AAAAA AAAAA AAAAA AAAAA AAAAA AAAAA AAAAA AAAAA AAAAA
    YBDRB UHWIE ERJRO HPVZI CDIJI ZUNNP JLIOB SSJIK SUDNQ
    (in our case AB) happend again, then you had a VERY good hint for the hamming distance

  3. And the Manchester Science Museum has a working replica of the Baby, which is demonstrated every day(?) at a certain time.

  4. There’s also the ABC. Apparently programmability was planned but never implemented.

    And Heron’s robots, of course.

  5. we have an assigment in computer and that is who discovered the computer and its charles babbage it was so good that i have learn in this website…

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