The history of computers is extremely broad and complex — it’s no surprise that drawing clear historical boundaries around their creation is a challenging task. In this article, however, I’ll go over some of the people that were the first in their own specific ways, depending on what you consider to be the first step on the road to today’s modern-day machines.
Earliest possible thing that could generously be considered a tool for computations: Pre-Historic South Africa
If your working definition of a computer is “a tool to help with computations,” then you’re going to have to travel really far back in time to find a point of origination. Technically, fingers fall into this description, considering that humans have been counting (which is a very basic form of computing) on their fingers since the beginning of time.
For a tool external to the human body that seems like it used to assist in computations, however, the current first invention is the Lebombo Bone, found in what is now South Africa, dating back to approximately 35000 BCE. The notches in the bone seem to be an early version of tally marks, designed to help make counting easier.
Earliest mechanical tool for computations: The Ancient Greeks
If you consider a computer to be any mechanical device that assists with computations, then bones with tally marks are not going to satisfy your search for the first-ever computer. The first historical example of something like that would be made by the ancient Greeks, an orrery (tool for calculating the positions of the planets) called the Antikythera mechanism.
The mechanism is extremely complex for its time: it contains several gears, several faces with engravings understood to represent the Egyptian calendar of the time, Greek zodiac symbols as well as the solar and lunar cycles. It was built in approximately 150 BCE or so, and its complexity would not be surpassed until over a thousand years later.
Theoretical foundations of computing: Muḥammad ibn Mūsā al-Khwārizmī
This is the only invention on this list that is not actually a physical object, but it is one of the most important elements in the development of computers. Muḥammad ibn Mūsā al-Khwārizmī, a Persian mathematician active in the 800s, is the founder of the theory of algebra, the foundation of all modern computing.
al-Khwārizmī made many contributions across various different fields of study, but his most significant one was to the world of math. He was the one to develop a repeatable system for solving equations (putting them in the form x=_), called al-jabr, roughly translating to “restoration” or “reunion of broken parts”. Al-jabr, Anglicized into the term algebra, continued to develop into the mathematical process we know today.
First programmable computer: Charles Babbage
One of the biggest steps forward in the world of computing, and one of the computers that would begin to be recognizable to us today as a true ‘computer’ was the Analytical Engine, developed by British mathematician Charles Babbage to perform a variety of different mathematical equations.
Babbage’s Analytical Engine, itself a development on his previous Difference Engine, used punch cards to take in data, both about the function that it would perform and the data that it would use. It worked off of what we would consider a primitive sort of assembly-level programming language, and while being designed in 1837, it would not actually be built until 1941.
The first computer that we would consider truly modern: Alan Turing
Another of the biggest steps forward in the development of computers was made by another British mathematician over a century later: the Automatic Computing Engine, developed by Alan Turing as an expansion on his earlier Turing Machine concept in the 1940s.
One of the most important differences between Turing’s Computing Engine and previous computers is that this was not only completely programmable, but it would ‘remember’ its programming within the machine without the need for information on its processes to be re-entered every time it ran. Its memory was tiny: in today’s terms it would be just 25kb, but it was the first computer with any memory at all.
Everyone listed above has some claim to the inventor of computers, depending on what you consider the computer to be. Broadly, Charles Babbage is considered the ‘real’ creator of the first computer, but the title is all relative. Who knows what the future of the machine will be, and who’s going to take us there. It could be a developer that living in our world today.
