Preston is a good, careful journalist, and his piece appeared in The New Yorker, which is renowned for the thoroughness of its fact-checking. Yet he gets credit for inventing the modern electronic computer, credit denied to the true inventors, Pres Eckert and Hopkins alumnus John Mauchly.
Writers construct a historical record, and mostly they do a good job.
Take your typical daily newspaper. Four sections, maybe 60 pages. Now imagine compiling a list of every individual fact conveyed in that one issue of the paper. The list would be impressively long, and 95 percent of the information would accurate. If you stop to consider the conditions under which newspapers are produced each day, the vagaries of securing accurate information from sources, and the complexity of communication among people, that level of accuracy is remarkable.