Short answers, pulled from the story.
The English writer Richard Brathwait used the word computer to describe a person in 1613 when he wrote about the truest computer of times in his book The Yong Mans Gleanings. For centuries the term referred exclusively to human beings who performed calculations, often women hired to do tedious arithmetic for less pay than their male counterparts.
Charles Babbage, an English mechanical engineer and polymath, originated the concept of a programmable computer in the early 19th century with his design for the analytical engine. He announced his invention of the difference engine in 1822 and realized the analytical engine was possible by 1833, though the machine was never fully realized in his lifetime due to political and financial difficulties.
Colossus was the world's first electronic digital programmable computer, using a large number of valves or vacuum tubes and paper-tape input. It was delivered to Bletchley Park on the 18th of January 1944 and attacked its first message on the 5th of February 1944.
The Manchester Baby was the world's first stored-program computer and ran its first program on the 21st of June 1948. It was built at the University of Manchester in England by Frederic C. Williams, Tom Kilburn and Geoff Tootill and was the first working machine to contain all of the elements essential to a modern electronic computer.
The MOSFET or metal-oxide-silicon field-effect transistor was invented at Bell Labs between 1955 and 1960 and was the first truly compact transistor that could be miniaturized and mass-produced for a wide range of uses. The MOSFET led to the microcomputer revolution and became the driving force behind the computer revolution as the most widely used transistor in computers.
Admiral Grace Hopper is credited for having first used the term bugs in computing after a dead moth was found shorting a relay in the Harvard Mark II computer in September 1947. Errors in computer programs are called bugs and are nearly always the result of programmer error or an oversight made in the program's design.