A younger me at the Babbage difference engine built by the Science Museum Success has many fathers, and so it is hardly surprising that there are numerous claimants to the title “inventor of the computer”. These include innovators like Aiken (constructor of the Harvard Mark I, 1944), Zuse (Z1, 1938), Atanasoff and Berry (ABC, 1942), Flowers (Colossus, 1943), and Mauchly and Eckert (ENIAC, 1946). But two men stand out, head and shoulders above all of them: Charles Babbage and Alan Turing. These two Englishmen invented the computer from scratch, but unlike the others, both failed to construct an actual machine.. Read more