Chronology of Digital Computing Machines, A

What was the first computer and who built it? It turns out that this is more a question of definition than a question of fact. The computer, as we now understand the word, was very much an evolutionary development rather than a simple invention. This article traces the sequence of the most important steps in that development, and in the earlier development of digital calculators without programmability. It may help you to decide for yourself whether you think the first computer was the ABC, the Z3 (aka V3), the ENIAC, the SSEC, the Manchester Mark I (aka Baby), the EDSAC, or perhaps yet another machine -- and how to apportion the honor of invention among John Atanasoff, Charles Babbage, Presper Eckert, John Mauchly, Alan Turing, John von Neumann, Konrad Zuse, and others.