Computer in 1900

To be realisitic about what might have been accomplished in 1900 the whole issue of building a large system of hundreds/thousands of components needs to be looked at more seriously. Will raised the issue for tubes, but it applies to all the other components as well, regarding reliability, uniformity and stability of characteristics. The idea of building such large systems was considered daunting or simply implausible even in the 1940's, after decades of development of components - even regarding something as seemingly simple as resistors. Or, for example, solid-state diodes: the discovery may have been made in 1874, but in the early 1900s the only thing actually available (TMK) was the cat's whisker (a tad finicky) - forget about building anything utilising more than a couple of them. Then there's achieving a stable power supply. ..so, depends on where you want to draw the line between concept and practice. The principles/theory of digital systems implementation may be straighforward, the practical reality when dealing with unreliable/variable components isn't so (including tubes); in particular if you don't have some heavily-non-linear device to base your basic gate design around. In 1900 there was very little in the electrical domain that was reliable or consistent for the purposes being discussed.