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The Difference Engine
Charles Babbage conceptualized and began developing the Difference Engine, considered to be the first automatic computing engine that was capable of computing several sets of numbers and making hard copies of the results. Unfortunately, because of funding he was never able to complete a full-scale functional version of this machine. -
Analytical Engine
Charles Babbage proposed the first general mechanical computer, the Analytical Engine. The Analytical Engine contained an Arithmetic Logic Unit (ALU), basic flow control, and integrated memory and is the first general-purpose computer concept. Unfortunately, because of funding issues this computer was also never built while Charles Babbage's was alive. Later in 1910, Henry Babbage, Charles Babbage's youngest son was able to complete a portion of this machine and was able to perform basic calcula -
Z1, First Functional Computer!
The Z1, originally created by Germany's Konrad Zuse in his parents' living room in 1936 to 1938 and is considered to be the first electro-mechanical binary programmable (modern) computer and really the first functional computer. -
The Turing Machine!
The Turing machine was first proposed by Alan Turing in 1936 and became the foundation for theories about computing and computers. The machine was a device that printed symbols on paper tape in a manner that emulated a person following a series of logical instructions. Without these fundamentals, we wouldn't have the computers we use today. -
The Colossus
The Colossus was the first electric programmable computer and was developed by Tommy Flowers and first demonstrated in December 1943. The Colossus was created to help the British code breakers read encrypted German messages. -
The ENIAC
The ENIAC was invented by J. Presper Eckert and John Mauchly at the University of Pennsylvania and began construction in 1943 and was not completed until 1946. It occupied about 1,800 square feet and used about 18,000 vacuum tubes, weighing almost 50 tons. Although the Judge ruled that the ABC computer was the first digital computer, many still consider the ENIAC to be the first digital computer because it was fully functional. -
First Version of Mark 1!
Around the same time the Manchester Mark 1 was also another computer that could run stored programs. Built at the Victoria University of Manchester, the first version of the Mark 1 computer became operational in April 1949 and was used to run a program to search for Mersenne primes for nine hours without error on June 16 and 17 that same year. -
EDSAC, or "Baby"
The early British computer known as the EDSAC is considered to be the first stored program electronic computer. The computer performed its first calculation on May 6, 1949 and was the computer that ran the first graphical computer game, nicknamed "Baby". -
Finally Delivered! The UNIVAC 1101.
First delivered to the United States Government in 1950, the UNIVAC 1101 or ERA 1101 is considered to be the first computer that was capable of storing and running a program from memory. -
Z4
In 1942, Konrad Zuse begin working on the Z4, which later became the first commercial computer after being sold to Eduard Stiefel, a mathematician of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich on July 12, 1950. -
The ABC
Short for Atanasoff-Berry Computer, the ABC started being developed by Professor John Vincent Atanasoff and graduate student Cliff Berry in 1937 and continued to be developed until 1942 at the Iowa State College (now Iowa State University). The ABC was an electrical computer that used vacuum tubes for digital computation including binary math and Boolean logic and had no CPU. On October 19, 1973, the US Federal Judge Earl R. Larson signed his decision that the ENIAC patent by J. Presper Eckert a -
Difference Engine No 2
the London Science Museum completed the Difference Engine No 2 for the bicentennial year of Babbage's birth and later completed the printing mechanism in 2000.
