It is debatable exactly what year one could point to in which you could definitively proclaim the official genesis of computers. Some could say the true beginning of computers began with Alan Turing, who designed the Turing machine in 1936, which was a model of a machine that helped solve complex mathematical algorithms. Yet the design never came to concrete fruition. The first fac-simile of a computer as we know it was the ENIAC computer.
Constructed in 1943 at the University of Pennsylvania by John Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert the ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer) consisted of 18,000 vacuum tubes, 70,000 resistors, and occupied 1,000 square feet. It was wholly impractical for not only its size, but it was also enormously expensive, required massive amounts of power, and generated so much heat that it had to be kept in a room requiring constant air conditioning. Due to the readily apparent impracticality of such a device, the ENIAC, among other first generation computers did not catch on in the mainstream.
Courtesy of UPENN
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