War around us

History of technology is unfortunately also history of warfare. During peace, army consumes a lot of each country budget - you can imagine what happens during state of war. More money for armament means more money for research to make "our" tanks, planes, guns ... better than "their".

Lets look around and think for a while - how many of your devices was invented by armies of the world as a civil side effect ?

Computer ? Yes of course !

Colossus first ever programmable computer was created by UK Army to help in cryptoanalysis of high level German messages - to be precise in cryptoanalysis of the Lorenz cipher. Some say that Colossus was created to break German Enigma code - which is not true. Enigma code was broken by Polish cryptologists who designed and created device called "bomba" (eng. "bombe") which was developed by allies forces into Bletchey Park "Bombe".

Of course there was ENIAC - the most known computer, and first general purpose computer - or was it ?

Maybe later ... but it was created and used by and for US Army to calculate artillery firing tables.

Because of armies and wars you can read this text and play World Of Tanks.

You may say that even without wars computer would be invented and so on. And you are right, but conflicts just speeded it up at the expense of milions of people ... in both world wars it is calculated then even 100 000 000 people were killed. And there were another conflicts...