The MotherBoard..
Answer:
The term "mother of ..." has many potential meanings. It can be the initiating force that makes you do something (Necessity is the mother of invention.), the first example of a device or idea (The mother of Eli Whitney's cotton gin was seeing a fox pawing at hens in a coop.), or it can mean the greatest example (It was the mother of all storms.)
For each case the answer is different:
- In the sense of "the initial need": Agriculture, where herds had to be counted and counting sticks were developed to keep track of the number of sheep or goats in a herd.
- In the sense of "the first example": Any of the abacus for the mechanical manipulation of numbers to arrive at answers. The Antikythera mechanism, an ancient mechanical computer designed to calculate astronomical positions and built about 150--100 BCE, or the Jacquard loom, invented by Joseph Marie Jacquard in 1801, which used punched card instructions as a program to weave complex patterns.
- In the sense of "the greatest ever": Discounting Skynet, the unified world wide computers from the Terminator movies, the under-development devices such as quantum computers which will use quantum level events to do vast numbers of calculations almost instantaneously will be the "Mother of all computers" when completed.
