Calm down mate. Have some tea and a scone.

lol^^

Lol where are you getting your info from Neapolitan? ENIAC wasn't the first computer. And Charles Babbage, George Boole and Alan Turing were all British and we certainly wouldn't have computers without them.

Furthermore, while Americans invented the Internet (the physical network and standards), the WWW (the actual service which runs on the Internet network) wasn't invented until decades later by Tim Berners-Lee. So if you think the net would be anything like it is today without his work, you'd be sorely mistaken.

This argument is idiotic anyway... any invention builds on existing knowledge and inventions - it's naive to try to credit the existence of computers or the net exactly to one person and their respective country, especially as the two are so complex and multi-faceted and have evolved through endless iterations. There have been many pioneers from many countries and here's a short list off the top of my head:

* Claude Shannon - father of information theory and digital communication
* Vannevar Bush - innovative thinking regarding his Memex in 1945 (read about it)
* Joseph Licklider - visionary in heterogeneous networking
* Douglas Engelbart - inventor of the computer mouse and NLS, leading to the desktop PC paradigm of the Xerox Alto
* Dennis Ritchie - creator of the C language and a developer of UNIX (Kernighan also)
* Linus Torvalds - creator of original Linux kernel
* Richard Stallman - leader of the free software movement and GNU project
* John Cocke - crucial to RISC architecture
* Edsger Djikstra - too many things to list
* Donald Knuth - seminal in the field of algorithmics
* Peter Chen - devised entity-relationship modelling and impacted CASE
* Alan Kay - a pioneer of OOP and window GUIs
* John Von Neumann - his ideas can still be discerned in modern computer architecture

This is hardly scratching the surface - I just noticed that I didn't even mention Nikola Tesla.

LOL if you are connected to the internet with a Difference Engine then by George I think you're onto something.

Honesly I don't understand the logic where you discredit the fact that the first electronic computer was design and built at the Unversity of Pennsylvania, because someone built a mechanical computer. By all rights you should attribute the first computer to the Greeks not the English.


Thanks, that is so awesome to know that the person who invented the TV was a Scotsman. :thumb:

Kind of a bad generalisation of the British and if it was any other race then this could be racism. Turning a post into some tit for tat crap is not what my answer was about at all and even if the internet could be attributed to many people my post was generally about what we have contributed to the world. Your retort has quite frankly left me fuming and the reason why I don't post on here as much as I want to these days.

Such a shame that a relatively easy going thread has descended into backbiting.

To be fair, a lot of threads these days end up in bitching. Everyone seems more bothered about arguing or slagging someone off rather than talking about something decent like, say, music.

Lee, get your ass back as a mod and clean up this town. :p

Using basic knowledge from my old social studies class...didn't Britain start the industrial revolution with many inventions like the spinning jenny, steam engine, fliying shuttle, etc.?

English inventions and discoveries - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

^ pwnage

Well you did say 'first computer' and not 'first electronic computer'. But even then ENIAC was not the first electronic computer. And even if it were, it would merely be the product of an arms race based on more significant groundwork by George Boole, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon, Nikola Tesla etc. I'm not saying it wasn't at all innovative - it was just somewhat inevitable on the scale of things and not a crucial stepping stone.

I'm not the one trying to attribute the existence of the computer to any one country. Like I said earlier, it's naive to attempt to credit the existence of the modern computer to exactly one person or country as you're so intent on doing. It's more of an iterative development than a one-off invention. If you have a look at the list of pioneers I posted earlier, you'll understand this.

The University of Pennsylvania is not a country, so I wasn't trying to attribute it to a country I was only relaying a fact that I heard. This is how I see it, you are the one who is fighting over semantics, so what if I said computer or electronic computer. Why do I have to explain the etymology of the word "computer." The way "computer" is used today no one ever thinks of a person who does computations, a mechanical computer, or an elctro-mechanical computer. The University of Pennsylvania is attributed to the concept, developement and construction of the first computer, in fact the C stands for "computer" in ENIAC ("Electronic Numerical Integrator And Computer")

btw Nikola Tesla was an American citizen!


It wasn't meant to be racist, well if you makes you happy I'm fequently a victim of racist remarks. I get called "Anglo," and they said it with such contempt it obvious it's said as a pejorative.

Well I sincerely apologize, how you feel is more important then some joke I tried to make - most of it I stolen from a English comedian, but that's no excuse. I won't try to justify myself, just hope you will expect my apology.