Colossus was the first
electronic digital computer
Your timeline (Milestones in
scientific computing, Nature 440, 401-405; 2006)
starts in 1946 with ENIAC, "widely
thought of as the first electronic digital
computer". But that title should arguably be
held by the British special-purpose computer
Colossus (1943), used during the Second
World War in the secret code-breaking centre
at Bletchley Park.
Modern computing history starts even
earlier, in 1941, with the completion of the
first working program-controlled computer
Z3 by
Konrad Zuse
in Berlin. Zuse used
electrical relays to implement switches,
whereas Colossus and ENIAC used tubes.
But the nature of the switches is not essential -
today's machines use transistors, and the
future may belong to optical or other types of
switches.
Jürgen Schmidhuber
IDSIA, Galleria 2, 6928 Manno-Lugano, Switzerland &
Robotics and Embedded Systems,
Tech. Univ. München,
Computer Science,
Boltzmannstr. 3, 85748 Garching, Germany