Invention of computer

The modern computer grew out of several lines of work, so the date given is best read as the arrival of the first large general-purpose electronic digital machine. ENIAC, built at the University of Pennsylvania by John Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert for the United States Army, was completed in 1945 and was designed to calculate artillery firing tables. It used thousands of vacuum tubes and could be reprogrammed by rewiring and setting switches. In the same year the mathematician John von Neumann described the stored-program design that most later computers followed. Earlier milestones include Charles Babbage's plans for an Analytical Engine in the 1830s, Alan Turing's theoretical machine in 1936 and the British codebreaking machine Colossus in 1943 and 1944. Transistors and then integrated circuits shrank computers from room-sized machines to the devices we carry today.

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