The machines arrive

In the 1940s, something changed.

People had built calculating machines before: mechanical devices that could add, subtract, or multiply. These machines were different. They could be programmed.

The same machine could do one task today and a completely different one tomorrow, depending on the instructions it received.

That was a different kind of machine entirely. A loom follows a fixed pattern. A steam engine does one job. But these machines were general-purpose. They could take instructions, process them, and produce outputs in many different forms. Nothing quite like that had existed before.