STRANGERTHAN FICTION

摘要

Who invented the computer? For anyone who has made a pilgrimage to the Universityrnof Pennsylvania and seen the shrine to the ENIAC, the answer may seem obvious: John Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert Jr., who led Penn's engineering team in the 1940s. As it says on the plaque, the giant machine made of 17,468 vacuum tubes was the first electronic large-scale, general-purpose digital computer. But notice all the qualifying adjectives. Does this mean there was a smaller digital computer that actually came first? 1 Yes, it does.