The War Machines
Zuse's Z3, Bletchley Park, Enigma and Lorenz, Tommy Flowers and Colossus, ENIAC and its women programmers, the von Neumann architecture and the stored-program idea, the Manchester Baby and EDSAC, UNIVAC and the first commercial computers, and the secrecy that shaped who got credit.
From codebreaking to stored programs
The "von Neumann architecture" (one memory for program and data, a processing unit, input and output) came from the ENIAC team's discussions, including J. Presper Eckert and John Mauchly; the 1945 report bore only von Neumann's name, a credit dispute that continues. The architecture still describes the laptop you are reading this on (How Computers Work course).
B. Jack Copeland (ed.), Colossus: The Secrets of Bletchley Park's Codebreaking Computers (2006); W. Barkley Fritz, "The Women of ENIAC" (1996); Kathy Kleiman, Proving Ground (2022); John von Neumann, "First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC" (1945).