In seventeenth-century England, a computer was a human being. His job was to do mathematical operations, repeating them over and over again, to compile useful mathematical tables for engineers, architects, astronomers, soldiers… That is why, at the end of that century, Napoleon commissioned the mathematician Gaspard de Prony to prepare the tables most accurate trigonometric and logarithmic data ever made. Prony decided to break up the more complex calculations into simpler ones so that less-skilled people could do them. One of the foundations of computers had just been born.
This fact inspired the Englishman Charles Babbage to go one step further: what if to do this we substitute human beings for machines? Babbage is often called ‘the father of computing’ even though his machines never made it past the drawing board. The closest he came to building a mechanical computer was his Difference Engine , designed to compute a class of mathematical functions called polynomials. Babbage discovered a theoretical model devised by the German soldier and inventor Johann Helfrich von Müller and began to work on it to improve it, but he never built it. The same thing happened with another of his designs, the Analytical Engine , the closest thing to a current computer, which he finished in 1835.
The truth is that among the thousands of pages of annotations and sketches that he left, we find the basic components of a modern computer defined: a logical unit that does the calculations (the CPU), a control structure with instructions (the programming language) and a place to store calculations (the memory unit).
From then on, various models of analog computers appeared, but all of them had the same drawback: they were designed to do a specific calculation, and if you wanted it to do another, you had to change or replace gears and circuits.
What is a computer?
The concept of the modern computer appeared in 1936. Then a young mathematician named Alan Turing came to the conclusion that a computer would have to be able to solve any problem that could be translated into mathematical terms and reduced to a chain of logical operations using only one word. binary code (zero-one or true-lie). All very Prony style.
On May 12, 1941 in Berlin, the engineer Konrad Zuse started up the computer that he had just built in the storage room of his house. He had financed it with a little help from the German government, and had used telephone relays: dubbed the Z3 it was the first program-controlled electromechanical digital computer . Zuse again applied for funds to replace the relays with electronic components, but was denied funding by the government because “it was not important to the war”. Z3 was completely destroyed on December 21, 1943 during an Allied bombing raid on Berlin.
While this was happening in Germany, in Bletchley Park, on the outskirts of London and in the strictest secrecy, a team of scientists under the direction of Turing were building an electronic, digital and programmable computer, Colossus . His goal is to break the code of Enigma, the German army’s cipher machine. Was it the first computer, as defined by Turing? No, because it did not serve to solve any problem.
The fight for the title of the first computer
Another computer, ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer), was. It was developed in secret for the US military by physicist John Mauchly and electrical engineer John Presper Eckert of the University of Pennsylvania in 1945. It was devised to do the complex calculations necessary for scientists to build a hydrogen bomb, and its programmers there were six women . Costing $800,000, weighing 30 tons and occupying a space that many would want for their home, 167 m 2 , it went into operation on December 10, 1945. It consumed 174 kilowatts and it was said that every time it was plugged in , the lights of Philadelphia flickered for a few moments. We don’t know if that’s true but it did raise the temperature of the room where it was up to 50 degrees.
Was ENIAC the first computer in history? It seems not. There was another one before it, ABC, short for Atanasoff-Berry Computer, developed by John Vincent Atanasoff and his student Cliff Berry in 1942 at Iowa State University.
On October 19, 1973, and after one of the longest litigations held in the United States -135 trial days and 77 witnesses-, federal judge Earl R. Larson ruled that “Eckert and Mauchly did not invent the automatic electronic computer, but they deduced it from the work of Dr. John Vincent Atanasoff” . Mauchly had apparently conferred with Atanasoff on several occasions between December 1940 and June 1941, which had given him good ideas for building critical elements of ENIAC. The media dust of this sentence would have been enormous if the Watergate affair had not broken out at that time…
Does it all end here? As in good thrillers , we still have one last twist: in 1988 the Mexican nationalized German Raúl Rojas showed that Z3 was really the first computer , since it met all the Turing criteria. The problem is that we only have access to his plans, and not everyone is convinced that he would serve for any problem.
So the swords remain high over who invented the first modern computer.
