• Question: Who invented the computer?

    Asked by Unknown123 to Betty, Isaac, Kieran, Silvia, Will on 14 Nov 2016.
    • Photo: Silvia Pardo

      Silvia Pardo answered on 14 Nov 2016:

      An engineer, of course! His name was Charles Babbage and he invented the first mechanical computer, it was basically a giant calculator made of gears and wheels and you had to give it instructions using punched cards.

Comments

  • Photo: Mark

    Mark commented on :

    I’m going to disagree with Silvia and chuck Alan Turing’s name into the mix – he was the first to prove that you could program a machine to do different things and even laid out the architecture of modern computers and the way they read and write to memory whilst they’re doing calculations.

  • Photo: Unknown123

    Unknown123 commented on :

    I agree with Silvia because We could argue that the first computer was the abacus or its descendant, the slide rule, invented by William Oughtred in 1622. But the first computer resembling today’s modern machines was the Analytical Engine, a device conceived and designed by British mathematician Charles Babbage between 1833 and 1871.