The article isn’t very clear on technical details, or in what way Colossus was “first”. The wikipedia article is though:<p><a href="https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colossus_computer" rel="nofollow">https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colossus_computer</a><p>I think the main innovation was the use of valves (similar to tube logic), while other machines of the day used relay logic.<p>This thing wasn’t really a computer though, in that it was not turing complete, since there wasn’t any support for branching or programmatic examination of its output.<p>Instead, the operators would tell it what to run, look at the result, then manually apply a flowchart to decide what operation to take next.<p>These first turing complete machine that “worked” was probably the Z3 from 1941. It was electromechanical and ran at one hz (vs the colossus which ran at 5000hz starting in 1942).<p>It’s unclear to me if the z1 or z2 were turing complete or not. The z1 supported floating point(!)<p>This article gives an overview of more machines, and links to articles about most of them:<p><a href="https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_computing_hardware" rel="nofollow">https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_computing_hardwar...</a>
National museum of computing [0] in Bletchley houses a rebuild of the Colossus computer. The people who volunteer there are great and always happy to explain the history.<p>PS. Bletchley is around an hour on the train from London Euston. Bear in mind that even though the museum of computing is located in the old Bletchley park complex, it requires a separate ticket from the main Bletchley Park museum.<p>[0] <a href="https://www.tnmoc.org/colossus" rel="nofollow">https://www.tnmoc.org/colossus</a>
Tangentially<p>One of my favorites movies: Colosssus: The Forbin Project<p><a href="https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0064177/" rel="nofollow">https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0064177/</a>
Somewhat related, I enjoyed reading the (1999) book <i>ENIAC, the triumphs and tragedies of the world's first computer</i> by Scott McCartney on that system.
Ah so room scale computing (and its power requirements) are kosher when it's not AI. But involve AI and out the woodwork comes "think about the carbon"