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.
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Boot your own ENIAC Supercomputer http://home.arcor.de/-ph/eniac/
http://www.zib.de/zuse/Inhalt/Programme/Simulationen/Z3_Sim/simulation.html
Remember good old Gottfried Leibniz who invented the Binary Number system in 1705
http://aberog.zip.net/images/Leibniz_binary_system_1703.png
Don’t forget Wilhelm Schickard who designed one of the first mechanical calculators in 1623. Our University’s CS department is named after him ;-)
How about Colossus?
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
And, especially sadly so for Turing’s own country, if you were to ask a layman here they’d guess Bill Gates.
As far as I know, the first Von Neumann computer was SSEM, “the baby” built at Manchester University and which ran its first program in 1948.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manchester_Small-Scale_Experimental_Machine
The key thing is that the SSEM used main memory to store both instructions and data in a unified address space; that is, it was the first computer that could support self-modifying code.
-cheers.
And the Manchester Science Museum has a working replica of the Baby, which is demonstrated every day(?) at a certain time.
Charles Babbage never had enough money to build his “Difference Engine No. 2″ but it was built much late. Check these links for really interesting information on this machine. I saw the monster in operation at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, CA — it was awsome!
http://www.computerhistory.org/babbage/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Difference_engine
Have fun!
yah!! True True thanks to him i learn many in computer….:3
Colussus was programmable although not Turing complete. You can see Tony Sale’s reconstruction at Bletchley Park – I saw him give a demonstration a couple of weeks ago during VCF-GB. Chunk Chunk Chunk! On YouTube too: http://tinyurl.com/32nt47o and http://www.tnmoc.org/videos-cipher.aspx
Note that Colossus was used to tackle the Lorenz ciper, not the Enigma.
There’s also the ABC. Apparently programmability was planned but never implemented.
And Heron’s robots, of course.
Charles Babbage invented the computer
if anyone said no he REALLY did invent the computer
who invented the computer????
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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