They were not; computers were programmable long before that. Before the 4004, the functionality that we today find on a CPU were distributed over a larger collection of circuitry, with different separate components for the ALU and the instruction interpreter and the register bank and the memory controller and such. But that assembly was already programmable and functioned as a Turing universal computer since the late 40s. The innovation of the intel 4004 was that it was the first design that had all that machinery on a single integrated chip (the first CPU as we might understand it today, in the sense of being the first central processing unit—earlier designs were decentralized, though the term “CPU” was already in use before then).
Wow are you saying Universal Computers were only built in the 70s? Half a century after Turing?
They were not; computers were programmable long before that. Before the 4004, the functionality that we today find on a CPU were distributed over a larger collection of circuitry, with different separate components for the ALU and the instruction interpreter and the register bank and the memory controller and such. But that assembly was already programmable and functioned as a Turing universal computer since the late 40s. The innovation of the intel 4004 was that it was the first design that had all that machinery on a single integrated chip (the first CPU as we might understand it today, in the sense of being the first central processing unit—earlier designs were decentralized, though the term “CPU” was already in use before then).