Yes, it's very much a matter of perspective, which is why I find it so fascinating. Babbage is clearly a candidate, as is Konrad Zuse [1], who built the first f

Yes, it's very much a matter of perspective, which is why I find it so fascinating. Babbage is clearly a candidate, as is Konrad Zuse [1], who built the first functional Turing-complete machine, and designed the first Turing-complete programming language [2] (it didn't have recursion, but neither had FORTRAN, before the mid-70s). Bottom line (for me): computers are the result of international and cross-generational cooperation and knowledge exchange; that's were progress seems to come from. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Konrad_Zuse http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Konrad_Zuse [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plankalk%C3%BCl http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plankalk%C3%BCl