thx for answering!!!!!!!
It depends on what you class as a combuter, whether it was one of the earliest calculater to something nearing what we have now.
To me it was the Colosses, beveloped by British Integence duribg WWII to break the Nazi Enigma Code.
http://www.computer50.org/mark1/contempo...
The first electronic computer was designed, built and operated by Alan Mathison Turing, with the help of Tommy Flowers and Max Newman, while working for the British secret service at Bletchley Park, during the second world war.
Flowers was the graduate electrical genius who actually built this valve computer, and Newman was a fellow mathematician who's input cannot be underestimated, but it was Turing himself who put this team together, and who's analytical thinking set the conditions for such a computer to be built. Without this, or his leadership and choice of people, the electronic part would never have been built.
Turing was an eccentric, but introvert mathematical genius, he was also a latent homosexual and the father of computer science in the modern world.
This huge electronic valve computer was basically a high speed sampling machine, which drastically reduced the time needed to crack the incredible number of combinations produced by the German Enigma coding machines.
The scientists at Bletchley Park played an instrumental role in the Battle of Britain, Alan Turing in particular.
Without Turing's computer, it is doubtful that we would have successfully cracked the German enigma coding device, and we would never have been able to decipher the messages sent to their submarine fleet.
In addition, and quite luckily, an enigma machine was found intact on a submarine that the German crew had abandoned, which they falsely believed was sinking.
This was given to Bletchley Park, and this meant they then knew how the coding system operated, and with this knowledge they could reprogram Turings computer accordingly, making it much more efficient.
After these enigma codes were broken, the allies basically knew where the German submarines were operating and we could better defend ourselves against attacks by these. A new problem arose in that we still had to allow some boats to be sunk, so that the Germans wouldn't suspect their enigma machines had been cracked.
Churchill once complained that he was forced to play "God", because he had to decide which boats would be allowed to be sunk, and which not !
At the end of the war, Turing's computer was simply broken up and scrapped because nobody realised it's unbelievable potential, but all modern computers are based on the same operating principles as his machine.
Turing committed suicide in 1954, after being convicted of gross indecency two years earlier, because of a homosexual act with a 19 yo boy. He chosed to undergo "chemical castration" rather than face 2 years prison, which involved him taking a course of female hormones,
He also lost his job as university proffessor, and his good reputation.
Homophobia killed one of the most important geniuses that Britain ever knew, someone who probably did more than anyone else to save the lives of so many allied sailors. We repaid him with sh!t, which we should be thoroughly ashamed of !
Tommy Flowers was awarded an MBE ! (I guess he was hetrosexual)
Turing was himself an enigma !
RIP
I take my hat off to him
Some unknown Sumarian about 5,000 years ago who invented the abacus, a mechanical computer.
John Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert are credited with leading a team of engineers that developed the first electronic computer.
First programmable electronic was Tommy Flowers.
Maybe you should ask what type. It is contested......
who did produce the first computer?
thx for answering!!!!!!!
