Word: eniac
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...John Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert build ENIAC, the first fully electronic computer...
...while this electronic brain, as headline writers called it, took the spotlight, ENIAC had a lot of unsung rivals, many of them shrouded in wartime secrecy. At Bletchley Park, Alan Turing built a succession of vacuum-tube machines called Colossus that made mincemeat of Hitler's Enigma codes. At Harvard, large, clattering electromechanical computers in IBM's Mark series also did wartime calculations. Even the Germans made a stab at computing with Konrad Zuse's Z electromechanical computers, the last of which was the first general-purpose computer controlled by a program...
...years, ENIAC's principal creators, the late John Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert, held the unchallenged title of inventors of the modern computer--until an obscure physicist named John Atanasoff came forth to dispute their claims. In the late 1930s, while teaching at Iowa State College, he and a graduate student named Clifford Bell began building a device that would allow them to solve large linear algebraic equations. Their machine, later called ABC (for Atanasoff Berry Computer), incorporated a number of novel features, including the separation of data processing from memory, and relied on binary numbers instead of ENIAC...
...invent the computer? Novel as it may have been, ABC could not be reprogrammed, did not handle large numbers well and never became fully operational. By contrast, the reprogrammable ENIAC did initial calculations for the H-bomb, kept flashing away for nearly a decade and led to a host of more sophisticated successors. Take your pick...
...John Mauchly and John Eckert unveil ENIAC, the first fully electronic computer...