> Seems to be dunking quite hard on Babbage for no reason. You can invent something and not be able to build it, and he clearly invented a computer in the quite

> Seems to be dunking quite hard on Babbage for no reason. You can invent something and not be able to build it, and he clearly invented a computer in the quite reasonable modern sense of a device operating from an easily-changeable stored program, with an attached store, to perform arbitrary computations and output the results. I'm not sure this is consistent with the way most people understand the term 'invent' -- the person credited as the inventor of a given technology is usually the person who first demonstrated a viable working example of it, not the first person to propose it as an idea, however detailed the idea might be. It's not enough to have a design you can't implement -- you have to implement it and refine it against the constraints of the usage context. That's not to disparage Babbage in any way -- his work was extremely important and definitely contributed to the development of modern computers, but I don't know if it makes sense to say that he 'invented a computer' in the same way we say e.g. the Wright brothers invented their airplane.