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ENIAC (the first electronic programmable computer) was patented in 1947 and first switched on that fall. See Growing Up with Computers. That makes the computer itself sixty two years old.

It's the kitchen of tomorrow:
http://ftp.arl.mil/ftp/historic-computers/png/cray2.png

And I thought I sucked at math when I couldn't remember how eigenvectors work the other day...

The numerical solution of differential equations, notably the Navier-Stokes equations was an important stimulus to computing, with Lewis Fry Richardson's numerical approach to solving differential equations. To this day, some of the most powerful computer systems of the Earth are used for weather forecasts.

You are talking about ARL being the ones that had ENIAC, right?

http://ftp.arl.mil/~mike/comphist/eniac-story.html

One could argue - and many have - that the current Internet does not give you enough of either. Security in the Internet context applies also to the security of the user from eavesdropping or interruption.

Also - please distinguish between government funded projects and research - GENI is research, pure and simple. Right now, there's no blueprint for what the results of this will look like, no deployment plan for rolling out a new, improved Internet. Rather, there's a plan to create a testbed to enable network research to be drastically more innovative and effective than it has been. Like all research, there will be successful projects under this umbrella, and unsuccessful ones. But if you never take the risk, you never have the chance to make amazing discoveries. Say what you want about government inefficiency, it's funding like that provided by the NSF, NIH, and (formerly) DARPA, and their corresponding agencies in other countries over the centuries that has made possible some of the greatest advances in the history of humanity.

That's a backronym. "Ping" was a reference to the sound sonar makes. (see http://ftp.arl.mil/~mike/ping.html or http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ping)

But it's outright silly to say that without copyright, there would be no free software when it's the other way around.

Let me se if I understand:

Without copyright, there would be no free software. Which reverses to:
Without free software, there would be no copyright.

No, I don't understand at all. The first copyright law was the Statute of Anne, passed by the British Parliament in 1710. Software, per se, didn't really get going till the mid-20th century (ENIAC was finished in 1945). So copyright pre-dates software (free or otherwise) by about 235 years.

Are you trying to say that if there was no copyright, then all software would be free? If so, I disagree. If software was not covered by copyright, then it would be public domain material. There would be no legal basis for asking people to share their innovations back to the community. You could take code, modify it, improve it, and then sell binary versions without releasing your improvements. You wouldn't be required to acknowledge the original author, and you could put the code into commercial projects whether the original author liked it or not. In short, none of the provisions that you find in existing free or open source licenses would be the least bit enforceable. The free/open source movements need copyrightable software - without it, we would have to rely entirely on people's goodwill and charitable impulses, which is a much more dubious proposition, especially where software intersects business.

The vast bulk of programming is just repetition. It's skilled repetition, but no more so than drafting or car repair.

Um, just one question... Where would computers be without hackers, and software devlopers?

Answer: We would be here

Quotes about the ENIAC:

"Thus ended the life of the once glorious pioneer in the field of digital computation"

"It's death was a natural one--it had served its purpose."

As quoted from: The ENIAC Story

• Manchester Mark 1 - 1947
  
• ENIAC, Philadelphia,PA (USA) - 1944
  
  • The ENIAC was placed in operation at the Moore School, component by component, beginning with the cycling unit and an accumulator in June 1944

we should be happy
according to it's weight compared to PC's
they had to make real disaster to build ENIAC

Man, can't you see beyhond?! Rembember ENIAC? It was the first digital computer. Let me just copy-paste a little:

By today's standards for electronic computers the ENIAC was a grotesque monster. Its thirty separate units, plus power supply and forced-air cooling, weighed over thirty tons. Its 19,000 vacuum tubes, 1,500 relays, and hundreds of thousands of resistors, capacitors, and inductors consumed almost 200 kilowatts of electrical power.

By your logic computers would never be PERSONAL computers, for gamming, watching videos, etc...

This is awsome, and in 10/20/30 years they can probably build one small enough to put in the livving room.

Your wrongness is astounding.

Actually, his wrongness was very subtle. First of all, he may very well have read somewhere that crypt(3) was based on enigma. That is all he claimed, isn't it? (I guess careful reading of posts isn't required on SlashDot either, not even by people who are anal about accuracy.)

Still, he did manage to pick out something called "crypt" as having been based on Enigma. My guess is that he uses Linux. His Linux distro probably no longer comes with a crypt utility (I ran into a problem with this recently and had to use this instead). Having no crypt utility, and thus no man page for a crypt utility, it's hard to remember that the crypt utility used to be crypt(1). Perhaps he just assumed that some code which was once a separate program called crypt has since been library-ized, keeping the same man page location?

While, for example, BSD's 'ls' program can be tracked all the way to the seventies, GNU people of course rewrote it just for the license sake.

A nice example is the 'ping' tool. The story of ping tells how the program was concieved and made, and the FreeBSD's current ping.c is based on it:

/*
* Copyright (c) 1989, 1993
* The Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved.
*
* This code is derived from software contributed to Berkeley by
* Mike Muuss.
... */
/*
* P I N G . C
*
* Using the Internet Control Message Protocol (ICMP) "ECHO" facility,
* measure round-trip-delays and packet loss across network paths.
*
* Author -
* Mike Muuss
* U. S. Army Ballistic Research Laboratory
* December, 1983
*
* Status -
* Public Domain. Distribution Unlimited.
* Bugs -
* More statistics could always be gathered.
* This program has to run SUID to ROOT to access the ICMP socket.
*/

The title of that article is a bit misleading.

Remember that MRAM is not really new technology. It's a new implementation of something that already was used in a computer half a century ago: In 1953 ENIAC got its 100 words magnetic memory.

And the photo of that sputtering machine makes it look like some cool contraption from an old frankenstein movie... Need I say more?

This is a terrible slashdot article, no hype, no good in-jokes, no mindless "____ is the next big thing".

Next you'll expect slashdot readers to actually learn something about the history of computing, and the basics of computer science, and information technology.

So I guess you have read the review of the book by John E. Fracisco
"Using deft allegory, the authors have provided an insightful and intuitive explanation of one of Unix's most venerable networking utilities. Even more stunning is that they were clearly working with a very early beta of the program, as their book first appeared in 1933, years (decades!) before the operating system and network infrastructure were finalized."..... click on link for more
The "alternative" history of ping.

If you think the Mortar Ballistic Computer is too big, just compare it to this
earlier model.

This is a good thing as the US DoD uses ADA95 for most everything AFAIK and the GNAT compiler works just dandy with Linux. This is what DoD needs, an inexpensive, yet totally robust system which they can put unleash the military programmers on.

A good example is BRL-Cad which is available for free download by US Citizens. This is a nice OpenGL capable solid modeler, somewhat clunky, but probably better than any other free CAD program available for Linux right now.

I'm a veteran of the US Military, and I think that Linux is a great choice for them, since they have the capability to provide cheap, effective, and efficient training about their computer systems to all the members of the armed forces. The US Military could easily train several million service personnel to be effective Linux programmers in a quite short period of time.

And of course, as a taxpaying citizen, I want my armed forces buying the best weaponry, not lining some 2-bit computer software vendor's pockets, especially when those vendors undermine the rights of the citizens by channeling that money back into lobbying for laws like the DMCA.

This is where RedHat shines. I use Debian myself, but Debian is too chaotic to apply for these certifications; however, RedHat could make a killing by supplying the US Government their software, and since Linux is Linux is Linux, this gives my government the state of the art software: it is secure, it is robust, it is inexpensive, and it is the best development environment in the world!

Mike Muuss was the author of PING which is found on nearly every system on the internet. PING is an excellent example of an open source contribution. From the website:

Sadly, Mike Muuss was killed in an automobile accident on November 20, 2000. His work lives on in testament to his intellect and indomitable spirit -- Lee A. Butler

Mike Muuss was the author of PING which is found on nearly every system on the internet. PING is an excellent example of an open source contribution. From the website:

Sadly, Mike Muuss was killed in an automobile accident on November 20, 2000. His work lives on in testament to his intellect and indomitable spirit -- Lee A. Butler

here http://ftp.arl.mil/~mike/ping.html

Now, unless I'm misinformed (wouldn't be the first time), the University of Pennsylvania made the ENIAC as the first electronic digital computer.

So what computer is it that you are referring to?

That's not entirely accurate. I beleive that ENIAC was the first digital computer, but it used base-10 logic instead of binary. The ABC was the first binary computer, and it was built at Iowa State University. A court case later on (1973) decided that the patent for the electronic computer went to Iowa State because it was more like the computers that were being developed.

At least I don't think the ENIAC had a digital display. Correct me if I'm wrong.

Another disadvantage of these early computers is that vacuum tubes are slow. Computers really didn't start to become practical until the late 50's and early 60's, when transistor computers came into use. Transistors made computers cheaper, faster, smaller, and more reliable.

Vacuum-tube computers were certainly inferior to their transistorized successors, but they were far from worthless. While vacuum tubes were prone to burning out, the problem could be managed. People devised special test equipment and testing procedures to guard against tube failure. Careful preventative maintenance could keep a system running well despite the limits of tube reliability. Good machine design could also avoid needless stress on the tubes, greatly improving their reliability and extending their life.

The funny thing is that the electronics establishment in the early 40s thought that electronic computing machines were not feasible for the same reason you mentioned--tube reliability. One of Eckert's greatest achievements was to figure out and demonstrate how to build a computer out of thousands of vacuum tubes without it being crippled by the limits of tube reliability. (Mauchly wasn't involved with this aspect of ENIAC; he left the nitty-gritty details of circuit implementation to Eckert.)

As for the speed, expense, and size of vacuum tubes, remember that they were competing with electromechanical relays, not transistors, and they were far superior to the relays. Vacuum tube machines made many previous intractable problems solvable in a reasonable amount of time for those who had enough money to make use of them. And in the late 40s and the 50s, there was an ever-growing community of people who saw the need. Computers at that time were much like massively parallel supercomputers today in that only the well heeled could afford them and only the most difficult problems could justify their use, but there was no shortage of such people or such problems.

Of course, none of this is meant to minimize the importance of the transistor machines in spreading the use of computers to a much larger community and to new classes of problems.

As for video displays on computers, they didn't really exist until the early 60s, and it would be a lot longer before they became the norm. When you say "that is kind of a hindrance for speedy work", you're thinking of interactive computing, which wasn't even imagined until the 60s and didn't really become dominant until the 70s. Before then, batch computing was the norm. And that's fine if your computing involves submitting a big job which does lots of computation and produces a small amount of output, maybe a table of numbers. Many scientific and engineering jobs (and even a lot of business jobs) fell into that sphere--a printer was fine for them.

In fact the very idea of interactive computing was considered to be a horrible waste of computing power when it was first proposed in the early 60s. Computers and computing time were so expensive back then that you wanted the machine to be as fully utilized as possible, and it was hard to see how interactive computing would be anything other than wasteful, since the computer would be waiting for the user most of the time. Of course, time-shared operating systems eliminated some of that concern, and the falling cost of computing power did the rest.

Even once interactive computing was accepted, printers were still used for a long time as printing terminals. Editing with a printing terminal is harder than on a video display, but it can be done with the right approach. All the earliest text editors and command languages were developed with printing terminals in mind, and they were used for decades before video displays finally took over.

(By the way, ENIAC did have a primitive digital display on each of its registers. The registers were decimal, and the value of each digit was displayed on a column of 10 lights above the circuits for that digit. This is more like a "blinkenlights" display than a modern digital display, but it was still useful.)

For details about the ENIAC's history (which was much longer and more useful than you might guess), you might want to check out http://ftp.arl.mil/~mike/comphist/. It's got lots of good information.

If you blew your GPL chance, and can't convince whomever to go for dual-license or a BSD-style license, try to see if the will buy the logic behind the BRL-CAD project.

As I remember: American Tax dollars paid for this, it belongs to Americans. If you are an American, you have the right to use the code.

Oh, and if you REALLY care to fight on this....get a lawyer or 2.

From his homepage:

Unlike every other document on the Web, this page is in final form and completely finished. *grin*

I've had the honor of caretaking a web site of a writer who died in a car accident last year. The family doesn't want the hassle of dealing with the technical issues or the thought of this information floating around forever. The reality is that you keep the site running a year or two until the domain registration expires and then you archive the files into cold storage. Your digital self isn't as permanent as you might want to think.

FYI, Mike's web site: http://ftp.arl.mil/~mike/, for the moment.

Please all have one minute of ping in his honor:
ping -c 60 ftp.arl.mil
That's so strange to look at http://ftp.arl.mil/~mike/ and thinks this guy talking to you, and giving you a mailto: link is dead. It's like if there was a ghost speaking to you.

What happens to dead's homepage ? Do someone close them ? Or do they stand, like a simulacrum of eternity ?

Internet is something too young to be accustomed to death

It's a sad news.

I agree that military innovation is certainly not a Bad Thing (as long as it's for OUR side ;-) One problem, though. The ENIAC was built for the Army, not the Navy. Computer History /x

Rob Pike has been badmouthing unix since at least, um, 12:56:54 GMT November 3, 1992. Go to this archive page and search page for "pike".

I suspect that the little known person who actually wrote the original ping might object... he tells an abbreviated version of how it came about on his webpage.

Of course hearing the story in person was even better...

I suspect that the little known person who actually wrote the original ping might object... he tells an abbreviated version of how it came about on his webpage.

Of course hearing the story in person was even better...

I suspect that the little known person who actually wrote the original ping might object... he tells an abbreviated version of how it came about on his webpage.

Of course hearing the story in person was even better...

This is the CAD package that DoD requires ground vehical designs to be submitted in. It is a 3d solid modeling system with the fastest raytracer I know of. It also has built in clustering methods. I personally have run animation generation sequence using over 100 CPUs on over 20 cabnets.

While it is not a GPL product it is free to anybody that is willing to send a fax saying they wont claim it as thier own. Check it out.

CTJ

See The Story of the PING Program by its programmer. Slashdot covered this topic in Review: The Story About Ping.

--Mike Gebis, gebis@ecn.purdue.edu

--Mike Gebis, gebis@ecn.purdue.edu