The idea was introduced in the late 1940s by John von Neumann, who proposed that a program be electronically stored in the binary-number format in amemory device so that instructions could be modified by the computer as determined by intermediate computational results. Charles Babbage: Charles Babbage KH FRS was an English polymath. A mathematician, philosopher, inventor and mechanical engineer, Babbage originatedthe concept of a digital programmable computer. Blaise Pascal: Blaise Pascal was a French mathematician, physicist, inventor, writer and Catholic theologian. .... Pascal, not yet 19, constructed a mechanicalcalculator capable of addition and subtraction, called pascal's calculator John Mauchly: John Mauchly. John William Mauchly was an American physicist who, along with J. Presper Eckert, designed ENIAC, the first general purposeelectronic digital computer.