What was the name of the world's first computer?

Answer 1

ENIAC

Did you know: ENIAC was the size of a full room and could only do addition. Wrong on several points.

ENIAC's accumulators did addition or subtraction.

ENIAC had a special unit called the multiplierthat could control 4 accumulators to do high speed multiplication.

ENIAC had a special unit called the divider/square rooter that could control 5 accumulators to do high speed division and moderate speed square roots.

In other words ENIAC was a 5 function calculator with 20 registers (accumulators). More complex functions (e.g. trig) could be programmed on a function table and evaluated by lookup and interpolation, when needed.

Also ENIAC was by no means the first computer, it commonly mistakenly gets this credit because it was the first electronic digital computer publicly announced that got nationwide news coverage.

Both the Atanasoff Berry Computer (ABC) in Ames, Iowa and the Colossus computers in Bletchley Park, England were functioning electronic digital computers that preceded ENIAC.

Also there were electromechanical digital computers in Germany (e.g. Konrad Zusa's Z1, Z2, and Z3) and the US (e.g. Howard Aiken's Harvard Mark I) that preceded ENIAC.

Before that there were electromechanical analog computers built as early as the 1920s (e.g. MIT's Differential Analyzer, Norden Bombsight).

The first computer ever known to have been built is a device now called the Antikythera mechanism that was found on a Mediterranean shipwreck and was probably built circa 100BC, it is a mechanical analog computer that does astronomical calculations.