In H Block at Bletchley Park, the historic code-breaking
facility 50 miles from London, visitors can view a rebuilt
working model of a Colossus, one of the first electronic digital
computers, built during World War II to decrypt Nazi codes. If
only they hadn’t waited 60 years to put it back together — there
might still be a British Empire. And Silicon Valley might be in
some bog outside of Bletchley Park. During World War II, there
were two major Allied efforts — one British and one American —
to build electronic computers. The United States needed
artillery-firing tables for their big-gun battleships. Until
then, the word “computers” referred to people, mostly young
women, who slowly fed error-filled information into number
crunching machines. One such operation, at the Aberdeen Proving
Ground in Maryland, was used to solve differential equations
involving speed, wind, distance, etc., to improve accuracy. Over
at the University of Pennsylvania, John Mauchly and J. Presper
Eckert, with help from the U.S. Army