How the Digital Computer came to be invented
Note that I am NOT saying "Who invented the computer?" or "What was the first computer?'
A recent book by Professor Raul Rojas of the University of Nevada, Reno, describes in great detail the series of machines designed and constructed by the German computer engineer Konrad Zuse (1910-1995).
In other publications, Zuse has been credited as “the” inventor of the digital computer, and that his “Z3” computer, operational in 1941, was the “first” computer. Rojas, to his credit, avoids such simplifications, while showing how Zuse’s work stands tall along with the work of other among other pioneers, including George Stibitz, John Mauchly, Alan Turing, Howard Aiken, John Atanasoff, John von Neumann, and a few others I don’t have space to mention. In Rojas’s words, “…until 1945 there was no ‘first’ computer, in the singular. Rather, the invention of the computer was a collective achievement that spanned two continents and 12 years.”
The “Z1” machine, built by Zuse in his parents’ apartment in the Kreuzberg neighborhood of Berlin.
There is a tendency for people to look for heroic inventors and the legends of their invention: Samuel Morse’s “What hath God Wrought?”; Edison’s light bulb, Henry Ford’s Model T, Alexander Graham Bell’s first telephone message to his assistant. The story of invention of the of the digital computer is no exception, Even Jane Smiley, the Pulitzer Prize winning author, has weighted in (in favor of J. V. Atanasoff)!
One thing we can say is that by 1951, the electronic, fully-programmable digital computer had been invented and was doing practical work. The controversy, if there is one, often stems from nationalism: the British champion the code-breaking “Colossus” the Americans the “Mark I” built at Harvard; and of course the Germans and the Zuse machines.
Much depends on the definition of “computer.” Especially its ability not only to execute a sequence of instructions— what we now call a “program” (a term coined by Mauchly) — but also to modify that sequence based on the results of a previous calculation. Have a look at Rojas’s book, if you can get hold of a copy. Less so the Jane Smiley book, as much as I admire her writings. Or, for a shameless plug: get a copy of the Third Edition of my History of Modern Computing, with my colleague Tom Haigh as the principal author:
I know this is sort of off-topic, but I had to include it. A number of my colleagues, who should have known better, actually fell for it!
Scientists from RAND Corporation have created this model to illustrate how a "home computer" could look in the year 2004. However the needed technology will not be economically feasible for the average home. Also the scientists readily admit that the computer will require not yet invented technology to actually work, but 50 years from now scientific progress is expected to solve these problems. With teletype interface and the Fortran language, the computer will be easy to use.
BTW, that’s Harry Huskey in the photo—a real computer pioneer.
While you allude and link to it in your story, the actual source of the photograph including Harry Huskey is described in this 2004 article. https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/1954-home-computer/ It was the result of a Fark.com competition to generate a plausible photograph with a narrative.
The console in the background was taken from an original photograph of a submarine maneuvering room console found on the U.S. Navy website. The U.S. Navy photograph is in color. It shows a typical set of analog readouts found in early nuclear power plants. A stretched photograph of a teletype machine replaces the interpretive panel at the foreground of the exhibit.
Note this text from the 2004 article: "The color picture above was taken in 2000 at the Smithsonian Institution exhibit "Fast Attacks and Boomers: Submarines in the Cold War." For additional details regarding this exhibit, please see this article which mentions NASM's Vice Admiral Donald D. Engen. https://soar.si.edu/sites/default/files/reports/02.08.exhibitioncasestudies.final.pdf See also https://americanhistory.si.edu/subs/index.html
It is indeed dangerous to anoint "the" inventor of the software-programmable digital computer, but my vote goes to Charles Babbage. Starting with Plan 27 in 1841, his design had conditional branching and thus was a Turing-complete general-purpose computer.