It seems like the author doesn't understand, in a fundamental sense, what a computer is. She has been led astray by surface appearances.

Digital "computers" are called that because they developed as higher-precision, lower-speed versions of "analog computers", which integrated systems of ordinary differential equations in real time (but faster). Examples included Bush's mechanical differential analyzer, the MONIAC hydraulic computer, electronic differential analyzers built out of op-amps, and, earlier, Michelson's harmonic analyzer and various kinds of planimeters. Reconfiguring these devices to solve different "programs" of equations involved reconnecting their parts in new ways.†

The thing that makes digital computers special, fundamentally different from both the analog "computers" they were named after and Shannon's pioneering digital-logic circuits, is that they are universal; instead of reconnecting the pieces physically to carry out a different "program", you can leave them connected according to a "universal program", which runs a stored program made out of data in some kind of data storage medium, such as a loop of movie film with holes punched in it, a player piano roll, a mercury delay line, or a DRAM chip. It can even run a program that interprets programs for a different computer, a so-called "simulator" or "emulator". So all such computers are, in a certain sense, equivalent; one may be faster than another, or happen to be connected to different I/O devices at some time, but there's no feature you can add to one of them that enables it to do computations that another one can't.

That's why we can use the same digital computer not only to numerically integrate systems of differential equations but to play card games, edit text, control lathes, symbolically integrate algebraic expressions, decode radio transmissions, and encrypt and decrypt. And it's why we can run Linux on an 8-bit AVR microcontroller.⁜

Because the designers of ENIAC lacked this insight when the design was frozen in 01943, at first ENIAC was programmed by reconnecting its parts with a plugboard, like an analog computer. It wasn't modified to be programmable with data storage media until 01948, three years after von Neumann's First Draft in 01945, in which he (and his colleagues) proposed keeping programs in RAM.

The Harvard Mark I (built in 01944) and Konrad Zuse's Z3 (designed in 01935, built in 01941) could run stored programs from tape, like Babbage's later designs and unlike pre-01948 ENIAC. But they were not designed around this insight of universality, and neither was well-suited to emulating more complex machines, lacking for instance jumps. The Z3 was proven to be accidentally Turing-complete, but not until 01998, and not in a practical way.

That insight into the protean, infinitely adaptable nature of digital computers was not enunciated by Babbage, by Lovelace, or even by the brilliant Zuse. It was discovered by Turing; it is the central notion of his 01936 paper, from which Dyson tells us von Neumann was working, as Russ Cox points out in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30623248.

And that is why Alan Turing is the creator of the discipline that later became known as computer science: it was he who discovered what we now call, simply, "computers".

______

† "Program" is used to mean "configure by connecting" up to the present day in analog electronics; an LM317 is a "programmable voltage regulator" not because its output voltage is controlled by software but because you can change its output voltage by hooking a resistor up to it.

⁜ Though Linux on an AVR isn't very practical: https://dmitry.gr/index.php?proj=07.+Linux+on+8bit&r=05.Proj...

Turing's concept of computational universality permits an amazing economy of hardware; it is the reason that machines like the LGP-30, the Intel 4004, the PDP-8/S, or the HP 9100A could be so much smaller and simpler than the ENIAC, despite being able to handle enormously more complex problems. The ENIAC contained 18000 vacuum tubes, 1500 relays, and 7200 (non-thermionic) diodes; the LGP-30 had 113 vacuum tubes and 1450 diodes; the 4004 had 2300 transistors (not including RAM); the PDP-8/S had 519 logic gates (not including RAM, which was magnetic cores; https://www.ricomputermuseum.org/collections-gallery/equipme... says the CPU contains 1001 transistors, and I'm guessing about 1500 diodes); the HP 9100A had 2208 bits of read-write core, 29 toroids of read-only core (holding 1856 bits), 32768 bits of ROM fabricated as a printed circuit board with no components, and what looks like a couple hundred transistors from https://www.hpmuseum.org/tech9100.htm, many of which are in the 40 J-K flip-flops mentioned in https://hpmemoryproject.org/news/9100/hp9100_hpj_02.htm or https://worldradiohistory.com/Archive-Company-Publications/H....