World War II Codebreakers Created the First Programmable Computer
Britain’s Colossus, completed in 1943, was the world’s first programmable electronic digital computer and was used to decipher German messages. Its existence remained secret for decades after the war.
💡 Fun detail:
Ten Colossus machines ran around the clock, each one capable of reading 5,000 characters per second—faster than any human team.
Source: National Museum of Computing