once again, this article is neglecting the role of Konrad Zuse:
Konrad Ernst Otto Zuse (/ˈzuːsə/;[5]German: [ˈkɔnʁaːt ˈtsuːzə]; 22 June 1910 – 18 December 1995) was a German civil engineer, pioneering computer scientist, inventor and businessman. His greatest achievement was the world's first programmable computer; the functional program-controlled Turing-complete Z3 became operational in May 1941. Thanks to this machine and its predecessors, Zuse is regarded by some as the inventor and father of the modern computer.[6][7][8][9][10][11]
Hi Henry, No intention to neglect Konrad Zuse at all and Z3 was certainly an important machine and Zuse deserves his place in history. It wasn't fully electronic though and I think that the lack of a conditional branch draws a dividing line between it and modern computers. Baby on the other hand was electronic, stored its program in memory - so was the first true von Neumann machine - and the ISA although very small had the key characteristics of modern machines. Of course it's all a matter of judgement!
You say, "In the ENIAC the form of the that storage (decimal) was quite different to that of the data that ENIAC operated on (binary)." Actually, ENIAC's 20 10-digit accumulators were decimal. Source: Wikipedia, and various references it cites:
once again, this article is neglecting the role of Konrad Zuse:
Konrad Ernst Otto Zuse (/ˈzuːsə/;[5]German: [ˈkɔnʁaːt ˈtsuːzə]; 22 June 1910 – 18 December 1995) was a German civil engineer, pioneering computer scientist, inventor and businessman. His greatest achievement was the world's first programmable computer; the functional program-controlled Turing-complete Z3 became operational in May 1941. Thanks to this machine and its predecessors, Zuse is regarded by some as the inventor and father of the modern computer.[6][7][8][9][10][11]
more can be read on Wikipedia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Konrad_Zuse
—Henry
Hi Henry, No intention to neglect Konrad Zuse at all and Z3 was certainly an important machine and Zuse deserves his place in history. It wasn't fully electronic though and I think that the lack of a conditional branch draws a dividing line between it and modern computers. Baby on the other hand was electronic, stored its program in memory - so was the first true von Neumann machine - and the ISA although very small had the key characteristics of modern machines. Of course it's all a matter of judgement!
No conditional branch? So, the Z3 was (in today's terms) microcode? That makes sense.
For me, the big dividing line is Turing-complete, the ability to change the stored program and thus drive yourself completely mad debugging it.
You say, "In the ENIAC the form of the that storage (decimal) was quite different to that of the data that ENIAC operated on (binary)." Actually, ENIAC's 20 10-digit accumulators were decimal. Source: Wikipedia, and various references it cites:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ENIAC