Great ideas that changed the world, and the people they rode in on

[shaddack]

Greeks, anyone?

[TheRizz]

@nixiebunny

Alan Turing and Conrad Zuse were the people who are considered the primary inventors of the computer… a Brit and a German. […] Yet who gets the credit in the USA? Those Eckert and Mauchly guys, who Turing dragged kicking and screaming into the world of symbolic computing.

I’m from the USA, and Alan Turing was not only mentioned in my classes as one of the creators of the computer, but is the only one of the four names you gave that I even recognize.

[Glitch]

To be fair, most advanced ancient cultures invented things, and often those things were very similar or at least based on the same priniciples as much more modern inventions.

For example, if you hear the phrase “lots of concrete” you might think of modern day Los Angeles or New York City, but it applied just as well to Ancient Rome. And while “ballistics” sounds decidedly modern and conjures up notions of bullets and guns, there was quite a lot of ancient “ballistics” research put into improving the designs of arrows, spears, seige weaponry, and the like.

The Chinese did invent a lot of very clever things, and made use of them in ways very similar to our modern technologies. If the trope has a flaw, it’s in the fact that it focuses solely on China when pretty much every ancient culture of any substance was about equally as inventive.

[SmashMartian]

@shaddack

Greeks, anyone?

Plato? Indian. Guru, big beard, wore a dhoti. Indian.

[jhbadger]

Turing’s Colossus was technically first, but is kind of irrelevant in the development of computers because it was kept classified by the UK until the 1970s. Modern stored program computers evolved from von Neuman’s EDVAC (US; 1946) and Wilke’s EDSAC (UK; 1949), which (unlike ENIAC) were in fact general stored program computers.