The Top Secret History of the Computer

How stolen ideas, patent wars and scandal changed the world…

1943 was an interesting time in history. World War II was causing death and destruction around the world, Alan Turing was over at Bletchley Park cracking the German Enigma code, and the US Army were hard at work perfecting the designs for the first Atomic Bombs.

We have all heard the tale of Alan Turing and his famous Enigma cracking machine. Most people however, are completely unaware that the blueprint of the modern computer was not designed by Turing or the scientists at Bletchley Park. Alan Turing is known as the Father of Computing for many good reasons, but he didn’t actually invent the computer as we know it.

As it turns out, the computer was mostly invented by another top-secret war-time research project, Project PX.

Our story begins at the University of Pennsylvania, with a team of bright scientists at the Moore School of Engineering. The team are attempting to build something that has never been built before, a revolutionary new electronic machine capable of calculating ballistics and artillery firing tables at incredible speed.

The top secret research was being undertaken by John Presper Eckert and John William Mauchly, two brilliant computer scientists who had received funding from the Army Ordnance Department to build the Innovative new machine.