I don’t think he’s necessarily the inventor of the computer. There are a few possible candidates, including Ada Lovelace or Charles Babbage, who were earlier.
“In her “diagram of development,” Lovelace gives the fourth operation as v5 / v4. But the correct ordering here is v4 / v5. This may well have been a typesetting error and not an error in the program that Lovelace devised. All the same, this must be the oldest bug in computing. I marveled that, for ten minutes or so, unknowingly, I had wrestled with this first ever bug.”
I don’t think he’s necessarily the inventor of the computer. There are a few possible candidates, including Ada Lovelace or Charles Babbage, who were earlier.
Babbage invented the computer, Ada invented the programming language that would be used to program it. She even wrote the first ever bug in it.
https://twobithistory.org/2018/08/18/ada-lovelace-note-g.html
“In her “diagram of development,” Lovelace gives the fourth operation as v5 / v4. But the correct ordering here is v4 / v5. This may well have been a typesetting error and not an error in the program that Lovelace devised. All the same, this must be the oldest bug in computing. I marveled that, for ten minutes or so, unknowingly, I had wrestled with this first ever bug.”
The first functioning programmable computer was Zuse’s Z3.
The Z3 was relay based in 1941. (Germans)
Collosus was 1943 and based on valves. (British)
The Harvard MK1 was in 1944. (Americans)
There was a lot of parallel development going on at the time, all converging on solutions.
Blaise Pascal was the real OG: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pascaline