If someone up and asked you “who invented the computer,” how would you respond? Bill Gates? Steve Jobs? Al Gore? Or say you’re more historically savvy, might you venture Alan Turing? Perhaps Konrad Zuse? Turing is the guy who, in the 1930s, laid the groundwork for computational science, while Zuse, around the same time, created something called the “Z1,” generally credited as “the first freely programmable computer.”
And yet all of the above could prove wrong, depending on what a British research team and millions of dollars turn up over the next decade. via Time/Techland
November 10, 2011
It all depends what you mean by “invent”. Geoffrey Dummer descibed an IC in 1952 – but didn’t make one. Jack Kilby made a working IC in 1958 – but it wasn’t capable of volume production. Six monhs later, and not knowing about Kilby, Bob Noyce built an IC that was capable of volume production. Who was the inventor?