this post was submitted on 29 Oct 2023
164 points (98.2% liked)
Programming
17364 readers
204 users here now
Welcome to the main community in programming.dev! Feel free to post anything relating to programming here!
Cross posting is strongly encouraged in the instance. If you feel your post or another person's post makes sense in another community cross post into it.
Hope you enjoy the instance!
Rules
Rules
- Follow the programming.dev instance rules
- Keep content related to programming in some way
- If you're posting long videos try to add in some form of tldr for those who don't want to watch videos
Wormhole
Follow the wormhole through a path of communities !webdev@programming.dev
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Zuse built the arguably first electronically programmable computer or something like that.
I've three bridges to sell to you
It depends on your definition of "computer".
There was a period of very rapid development, largely government funded efforts as both sides of the war saw computers as critical strategically, and a bunch projects went from "hey do you think this might work?" to "here's an unlimited budget, go make it work."
They were all heavily influenced by each other (and spying on each other, and lying about the extent of their intelligence gathering capabilities) and computers were progressively developed in paralel.
Who did it "first" depends on where you draw the line in the sand and say "yes, this is a computer". Even the "turing" test doesn't work as a clear definition, because the first computers that could pass the that test were barely able to pass in practice.
Also, I think you could make a compelling argument that none of those projects would've received all that funding (and there definitely would've been less espionage) unless a war was going on. If the war hadn't happened, computers would've taken much longer to be invented.
What lol