posted on Nov, 20 2013 @ 11:58 PM
reply to post by boymonkey74
Not to take anything away from Charles Babbage or Alan Turing, but what you're saying is not entirely true:
Babbage never completed either his
Difference Engine or
Analytical Engine (and don't forget Ada Lovelace's contribution here). Konrad
Zuse, a German, actually made the first "Turing-complete" computer in 1941, the
Z3. In 1944 there was the Harvard Mark 1 which was designed by
Howard Aiken at IBM. ENIAC was designed by John Presper Eckert & John W. Mauchly at the Univiveristy of Pennsylvania, it was started in 1943 but not
finished until 1946.
John von Neumann (Hungarian born, immigrated to US) actually published a paper about a stored-program computer (EDVAC) prior to Turing's paper about
his ACE computer design in 1946. The world's first stored-program digital computer was the Manchester Baby Computer designed by Tom Kilburn and F.C.
(Freddie) Williams who were British.
Then in 1947 John Bardeen & Walter Brattain at AT&T Bell Labs discovered the "transistor effect" and William Shockley (British) helped to create the
first point-contact transistor. Coincidentally, German's Herbert Mataré and Heinrich Welker independently invented their own point-contact transistor
in 1948 but I believe their work was based on the Bardeen & Brattain research.
In 1951 Eckert & Mauchly designed the UNIVAC which was the first computer to employ transistors (though it was still vacuum tube based) and the first
general purpose commercial computer. The first computer language, FORTRAN was created by American, John Backus in 1954. Things really kicked off when
Robert Noyce of Fairchild Semiconductor (later he was a co-founder of Intel) and Jack Kilby of Texas Instruments independently and almost
simultaneously created the first ICs (Integrated Circuits aka "microchips"). Basically everything else hardware-wise was done by Americans:
microprocessors, RAM, disk drives, networking, etc.
edit on 20-11-2013 by theantediluvian because: (no reason given)