When is the first computer made and how it works?
Probably the first invention of any note was Charles Babbage’s “Difference Engine”, a sort of mechanical calculator that nearly bankrupted him to create (he created two, I believe), and which he never really finished. That was in eighteenth or nineteenth century, I think. There have been devices that could be thought of as computers since at least around 1920, when IBM built a machine used in the census. Components that would later be used in computers, including the transistor, existed or were in experimental form for decades after that, but not really integrated into the design of the devices. Alan Turing (see below) worked on a machine called “Colossus” during WWII. But as far as the first “significant” electronic computer, I believe it was either ENIAC or UNIVAC. It was built by Eckhert and Mauchly. They “toggled in” the binary codes manually, using flip-switches, and much of the programming was done by changing wires and that sort of thing. It used vacuum tubes, as transistors had
