ABSTRACT
Modern computers are complex amalgams of logic and engineering and it would be possible to single out any one person as the inventor. Joseph-Marie Jacquard loom that weaves cloth with a pattern specified by a stack of punched cards revolutionized weaving practice, first in France, and eventually all over the world. With perhaps understandable hyperbole, it is commonly said among professional weavers that this was the first computer. Charles Babbage proposed to use punched cards like Jacquard's for his never-built analytical engine. He owned a selfportrait of Jacquard in the form of a weaving. As with Turing, von Neumann's wartime work called for large-scale computation. But, where the cryptanalytic work at Bletchley Park emphasized the side of computation involving symbolic patterns, so in tune with Turing's earlier work, it was old-fashioned heavy number crunching that von Neumann needed. Arithmetic operations were to be carried out by programming: by software rather than hardware.
