The Computer, Inventions
Standing
Concerns Description
Currently States The computer, in the sense recorded here, is the general purpose electronic digital computing machine, distinct from the mechanical calculating engines and abstract computation theory that Science's own facets of this history hold. J. Presper Eckert and John Mauchly completed ENIAC at the University of Pennsylvania in 1945, unveiled publicly in February 1946, the first general purpose electronic digital computer. John Atanasoff and Clifford Berry had already built the Atanasoff-Berry Computer at Iowa State between 1939 and 1942, the first machine to compute electronically, though it was fixed to solving linear equations and never patented; a 1973 federal court found ENIAC's patent derived from it and invalidated that patent. Konrad Zuse's Z3, completed in Berlin in May 1941, was the first programmable, fully automatic computer of any kind, but electromechanical rather than electronic.
Which machine counts as the computer's true inventor depends on which criterion is decisive: first programmable machine of any kind (Zuse's Z3, 1941, electromechanical), first electronic calculating machine (Atanasoff and Berry's ABC, 1939 to 1942, not general purpose and never patented), or first general purpose electronic machine (Eckert and Mauchly's ENIAC, 1945, whose own patent a federal court invalidated in 1973 as derived from the ABC). No single date or name is treated as settled across these accounts.
Source Encyclopaedia Britannica, Encyclopaedia Britannica editors