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That's really great to hear. Aside from this web page I'd unfortunately never heard of his work before. If you have any references I'd be interested in reading them.

It's interesting that the wikipedia pages on the Manchester Baby, ENIAC, and Z3. All refer to them as "first computers" by one definition or another. I guess the ones you end up hearing about are to a degree culturally determined.

I assumed something similar might have been developed in Japan. And it seems they also developed a relay based computer in 1952 which I found interesting:

http://museum.ipsj.or.jp/en/computer/dawn/0005.html




Well (according to Wiki, at least, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z3_(computer)#The_Z3_as_a_univ... ) the Z3 was only accidentally Turing-equivalent, and the hack for writing arbitrary programs on it was only discovered in 1998 (and wouldn't have been practically useful anyhow). The Manchester Baby was operational and ran its first program before the completion of the redesign and rebuild that made ENIAC Turing-equivalent. However, it had only been built as a technology demonstrator/testbed, and it was soon disassembled. (I say Turing-equivalent, but Turing's work wasn't the inspiration for any of these efforts to build a fully-programmable computer.)


There is at least the Konrad Zuse Internet Archive, even partly in english: http://zuse.zib.de/. I have no own references apart from lecture slides I have no access to anymore.

The thing with the first computer is similar with cars. France has a very different definition of what was the first car than germany - distinguishing between the first car and the first "modern" car - the same will probably be true for the USA and UK.




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