The first computers
Turing defines computation, and wartime machines make it electronic.
- When
- —
- Duration
- 9 years
- Known to
- ± 1 year
- Era
- Industrial, Holocene
Turing's 1936 paper on computable numbers defines a universal machine and shows some problems have no algorithmic solution. Colossus, built at Bletchley Park from 1943 to break the Lorenz cipher, is the first programmable electronic digital computer; it was kept secret for decades and several were destroyed. ENIAC follows in 1945. Babbage and Lovelace had described the concept a century earlier without being able to build it.