Obligatory comment that the Z3 was the world's first digital computer. Not sure what the "real" refers to in the headline, but it turns out that the Z3 was indeed Turing complete.
If you didn't know, you're been hell-banned for months. That's why so few people reply to your comments.
But anyway, keeping something secret doesn't mean it didn't happen. And it's now public knowledge for anyone who cares to look outside the history of the US.
You have to have a certain level of karma to be able to see shadow-banned people. Otherwise... yeah not knowing about it is kind of the point, isn't it?
Of course I'm banned on HN - I'm not a leftist, right dang?
Very unfair. As somebody who has regularly commented here against the excesses of the left, while sometimes the silent downvoting has often been telling as to the sympathies of some, the moderation has always been scrupulously fair.
> Well, Britain decided to hide everything behind the Official Secrets Act, which workers proudly maintained.
Fun fact: GCHQ still refuses to talk about some of the earliest computing work on Colossus and enigma decryption. I was quite surprised to hear this when I was on a tour of The National Museum of Computing at Bletchley Park[0].
I hope that if/when they do decide to declassify that information that they'll hand it over to TNMOC.
[0] https://www.tnmoc.org/ - It's well worth a visit so when they're open again post-COVID see if you can get down there.
It's... complicated. The title of first digital computer can be argued to be ABC, Z3, Colossus, or ENIAC, and which one you give it to is going to be decided on the basis of how precisely you define "first digital computer." Given that there is also an element of nationalism to the decision (is the first computer German, British, or American?), it's not entirely unreasonable to suppose that the criteria is partially determined by the desire of whom to crown.
Personally, I don't think the fact that the Z3 and the Colossus were discovered to be Turing-complete long after they were last used should really qualify them for a title based on "first Turing-complete machine." The long time it took to establish Turing-completeness indicates that they weren't designed to be Turing-complete, and that they are is more a reflection of just how low a bar it is to be Turing-complete than the capabilities of the machines themselves. In other words, I would submit that the phrase "first Turing-complete machine" should really be understood as "first intentionally Turing-complete machine."
Another framework that makes sense to understand is the role that the computers had on later development of the field. ENIAC clearly has a massive influence, since it's the one that spawned more recognizable computers as its progeny. The influence of ABC on ENIAC only came out much later (and is still somewhat debated). Z3 had little impact on the field later because it was on the wrong side of WW2. Colossus I believe did influence the Manchester machines, but this link was not known at the time because of the secrecy around Colossus.
Who knows, perhaps if the minds behind Paperclip had been a little more data-minded:
* today, Z3 might be considered "first real"
and
* today, we might be stuck writing code in a fossilized language lovingly called Plankalkül 58 by its inventors that had so much inertia back then that it stifled all further development in the 1960ies, with the result that all of our 2021 computing would be about as fresh as the 2021 B52.
Haha, got me, I was just picking any "year used to name a language version" suffix at random, without realizing what corner of computing history this one is associated with. Is there anbody from that era who didn't have their own ALGOL?
We all know what they mean - they mean it was American.