But by the 1950s, general-purpose, fully programmable computers had emerged as the dominant computing architecture.
The early evolution of the digital computer validated Turing’s foundational insight. In the 1940s, different physical computers were built for different tasks: one to calculate the trajectories of missiles, say, and another to decipher enemy messages. But by the 1950s, general-purpose, fully programmable computers had emerged as the dominant computing architecture. Their versatility and adaptability across use cases proved a decisive advantage: they could be continuously updated and used for any new application simply by writing new software.