Who was the first American that invented a computer?

Answer 1

Alan Turing, I think. He made the computer, I am not to sure. Turing was British not American. The first American to invent a programmable computer was likely Vanevar Bush in 1929, but his was analog electromechanical, it was called the Differential Analyzer. The first American to invent an electronic digital computer was John Vincent Atanasoff, but his was not programmable, while it had no name at the time it was built it was later called the Atanasoff-Berry Computer. The first American to invent a programmable digital computer was Howard Aiken, but his was electromechanical, it was called the Harvard Mark I. The first programmable electronic digital computer was invented by Thomas Flowers of the British Post Office in 1942, called Colossus it was used to crack the German high command's cyphers (with 11 machines built prior to the end of the war, it was the only digital computer built prior to 1950 in a quantity greater than 1). The first Americans to invent a programmable electronic digital computer were John Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert, but their machine ENIAC was a dead end architecture that was very difficult to program. The first programmable electronic digital computer resembling modern ones in architecture, called the Manchester Baby, was built by the British in 1948, but it had a minuscule memory of only 32 words of 32 bits each. Practical programmable electronic digital computers resembling modern ones in architecture really had to wait for the early 1950s and by then inventions only covered improvements in specific design detail, not whole computers.