WHO IS THE FIRST INVENTOR OF "PROGRAMMABLE COMPUTER"?

KONRAD ZUSE (1910-1995)

-inventor of first working programmable computer

-world's first program-controlled computer. Despite certain mechanical engineering problems it had all the basic ingredients of modern machines, using the binary system and today's standard separation of storage and control. Zuse's 1936 patent application (Z23139/GMD Nr. 005/021) also suggests a von Neumann architecture (re-invented in 1945) with program and data modifiable in storage.

-1941: Zuse completes Z3, world's first fully functional programmable computer.

-1945: Zuse describes Plankalkuel, world's first higher-level programming language, containing many standard features of today's programming languages. FORTRAN came almost a decade later. Zuse also used Plankalkuel to design world's first chess program.
-1946: Zuse founds world's first computer startup company: the Zuse-Ingenieurbüro Hopferau. Venture capital raised through ETH Zürich and an IBM option on Zuse's patents.

Note: Babbage (UK, around 1840) planned but was unable to build a non-binary, decimal, programmable machine. The binary ABC (US, 1942) of Atanasoff (of Bulgarian origin) and Eckert and Mauchly's decimal ENIAC (US, 1945/46) were special purpose calculators, in principle like those of Schickard, (1623), Pascal (1640) and Leibniz (1670), though faster (with tubes instead of gears; today we use transistors). None of these machines was freely programmable. Neither was Turing et al.'s Colossus (UK, 1943-45) used to break the Nazi code. The first programmable machine built by someone other than Zuse was Aiken's MARK I (US, 1944) which was still decimal, without separation of storage and control.