Question
Who Invented the Computer?
No single person invented the computer. The idea of a general-purpose computer was designed by Charles Babbage in the 1830s, and the first working electronic computers were built by several different teams in the 1940s. Who counts as the inventor depends on what you mean by a computer.
If you mean the design of a machine that can be programmed to carry out any calculation, the credit goes to Charles Babbage, whose Analytical Engine set out that idea more than a century before it could be built. His collaborator Ada Lovelace wrote the first program for it. If you mean the mathematical definition of computing, that came from Alan Turing in 1936.
If you mean the first machine actually built and run, there is no single answer, because several arrived close together for different purposes. Colossus, built at Bletchley Park in 1943, was the first programmable electronic digital computer, though it was designed for codebreaking rather than general use. ENIAC, completed in 1945 in the United States, was the first general-purpose electronic computer. The stored-program design that nearly all later computers followed was set out by John von Neumann in 1945 and first run on the Manchester Baby in 1948.
So the honest answer is that the computer was invented in stages, by many people, over more than a hundred years.
Frequently asked
Who invented the first computer?
Charles Babbage designed the first general-purpose computer, the Analytical Engine, in the 1830s, though it was never built in his lifetime. The first working general-purpose electronic computer, ENIAC, was completed in 1945 by John Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert.
Was the computer invented by Babbage or Turing?
Both contributed different things. Babbage designed the first mechanical general-purpose computer in the 1800s. Alan Turing defined what a computer is in mathematical terms in 1936, providing the theory. Neither built an electronic computer; that came in the 1940s.
When was the first computer invented?
The first design for a general-purpose computer dates from the 1830s. The first working electronic computers were built in the 1940s, including Colossus in 1943 and ENIAC in 1945.