Inventor

Who Did Invent the Computer?

So, who did invent the computer? By now you should appreciate that this is, essentially, a meaningless question. Over a long period people attempted to design and construct calculating machines. As time passed more and more enabling technologies were developed and computer-like machines began to emerge in the 1940s. These machines had some of, but not all, the attributes of machines that we now call a computer. Some lacked the stored program concept, others lacked the ability to handle conditional operations, and so on. It seems to me unfair to declare that any one of these machines was the first computer.

Had these computers not been developed, modern computing might have taken a different path. However, the computing industry would probably have ended up not too far from today's current state.

Society always likes to associate a specific person with an invention. Since 1950 Mauchly and Eckert had shared the original computer patent rights because of their work on the ENIAC [Kraft79]. As we stated earlier, in 1973 Judge Larson in Minneapolis presided over the suite brought by Sperry Rand against Honeywell Incorporated for patent infringement. Judge Larson ruled that John Atanasoff should be credited with the invention of the computer and ruled that the Mauchly and Eckert patent was invalid because Atanasoff met John Mauchly at a conference in 1940 and discussed his work at Iowa State with Mauchly. Furthermore, Mauchly visited Atanasoff and looked at his notes on his work.

The following table provides a timescale for the development of the computer, although some of the dates are approximate because an invention can be characterized by the date the inventor began working on it, the date on which the invention was first publicly described or patented, the date on which is was manufactured, the date on which they got it working, or the date on which the inventor stopped working on it.

1520	John Napier invents logarithms and develops "Napier's Bones" for multiplication.
1654	William Oughtred invents the horizontal slide rule
1642	Blaise Pascal invents the Pascaline, a mechanical adder
1673	Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz modifies the Pascaline to perform multiplication
1822	Charles Babbage builds the Difference Engine.
1801	Joseph Jacquard develops a means of controlling a weaving loom using holes in punched through wooden cards.
1833	Babbage begins to design his Analytic Engine capable of computing any mathematical function.
1842	Ada Augusta King begins working with Babbage. She invents the concept of programming.
1850?	George Boole develops Boolean logic, the basis of switching circuits and computer logic.
1890	Herman Hollerith develops a punched-card tabulating machine to mechanize U.S. census data.
1906	Lee De Forest invents the vacuum tube (an electronic amplifier)
1940	John V. Atanasoff and Clifford Berry build the Atanasoff-Berry Computer (ABC). This was the first electronic digital computer.
1941	Konrad Zuse constructs the first programmable computer, the Z3, which was the first machine to use binary arithmetic. The Z3 was an electromechanical computer.
1943	Alan Turing designs Colossus, a machine used to decode German codes during WW2.
1943	Howard H. Aiken builds the Harvard Mark I computer. This was an electromechanical computer.
1945	John von Neumann describes the stored-program concept.
1947	ENIAC (Electrical Numerical Integrator and Calculator) is developed by John W. Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert, Jr. at the University of Pennsylvania to compute artillery firing tables. ENIAC is not programmable and is set up by hard wiring it to perform a specific function. Moreover, it cannot execute conditional instructions.
1947	William Shockley, John Bardeen and Walter Brattain of Bell Labs invent the transistor.
1948	Freddy Williams, Tom Kilburn and Max Newman build the Manchester Mark I, the world’s first operating stored program computer.
1949	Mauchly, Eckert, and von Neumann build EDVAC (Electronic Discrete Variable Automatic Computer). The machine was first conceived in 1945 and a contract to build it issued in 1946.
1949	Maurice Wilkes builds the EDSAC (Electronic Delay Storage Automatic Computer), the first fully functional, stored-program electronic digital computer in Cambridge with 512 35-bit words.
1946	Turing write a report on the ACE, the first programmable digital computer.
1951	Mauchly and Eckert build the UNIVAC I, the first commercial computer intended for specifically for business data-processing applications.
1959	Jack St. Clair Kilby and Robert Noyce construct the first integrated circuit
1960	Gene Amdahl designs the IBM System/360 series of mainframes
1970	Ted Hoff constructs the first microprocessor chip, the Intel 4004. This is commonly regarded as the beginning of the microprocessor revolution.

Timescale for the computer from Napier to Intel