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http://www.zib.de/zuse/Inhalt/Programme/eniac/

In This chart, Fortran is the first Computer Language. This is not true, The first Computer Language, was "Plankalkül" (Plan-Calculus) invented 1936 by Conrad Zuse to program his "Z1" Computer (The first binary and programmable computer in the world). The Programs were fed into the computer using punched 35mm Celluloyd film-rols.

In This chart, Fortran is the first Computer Language. This is not true, The first Computer Language, was "Plankalkül" (Plan-Calculus) invented 1936 by Conrad Zuse to program his "Z1" Computer (The first binary and programmable computer in the world). The Programs were fed into the computer using punched 35mm Celluloyd film-rols.

In This chart, Fortran is the first Computer Language. This is not true, The first Computer Language, was "Plankalkül" (Plan-Calculus) invented 1936 by Conrad Zuse to program his "Z1" Computer (The first binary and programmable computer in the world). The Programs were fed into the computer using punched 35mm Celluloyd film-rols.

Pictures of the Z1

Or some of his scanned notes, or other stuff, linked here at the site of the Zuse Institute

Pictures of the Z1

Or some of his scanned notes, or other stuff, linked here at the site of the Zuse Institute

Pictures of the Z1

Or some of his scanned notes, or other stuff, linked here at the site of the Zuse Institute

If you are interesred in Plankalkül, check this out. You can even play the chess game ;-)
Also, there are a lot more resources linked there, including pics of the remains of the original machines an some rebuilds. Main page is here

If you are interesred in Plankalkül, check this out. You can even play the chess game ;-)
Also, there are a lot more resources linked there, including pics of the remains of the original machines an some rebuilds. Main page is here

BTW, Zuse's Z3 is therefore, at least in principle, as universal as today's computers which have a bounded addressing space..

However, you're right about the Z3 (and probably the others) - it was Turing complete, but only through chicanery that Zuse wasn't aware of; its input was a paper tape which could be looped - tape the ends together; and the conditional could be provided by using the feature that the machine would stop if given an illegal operation (such as divide by zero). Very cunning - details here. The trick is that multiplication and division have conditional branching embedded in them at the hardware level and this can be "raised up" to allow flow control.

As the Zuse Z3 was completed (and operational) in 1941 (ABC in 1942, possibly) then the Z3 wins the race for the first (Turing complete) computer.

It does raise an interesting philosophical question because the Turing completeness of the Z3 was only realised 1998, 57 years after it machine was built (although Zuse thought it was complete).

The difference is that the Zuse machines were fully binary and had a system clock, so in that sense they are more closely related to our current computers.

FWIW, you can find an online simulator of the Z3 (written in Java) here. It's all in German, though.

Yes, the "Deep Thought" was a 64 node of Ultrasparc 20 workstations, and the program was developed by a guy called Feng-hsiung Hsu. Some of the feats of Deep Thought can be found here and here .
Kasparov was the first of the international masters to beat Deep Thought. He was also the first world champion to be defeated by any computer... which at the time happened to be IBM's Deep Blue.

Konrad Zuse. Before the British heard of the Enigma.

Here's another good Zuse resource. Has background/biographical info, simulations/replicas of his machines, and an archive of his papers.

DOC++ looks useful, too. I spent 7 years coding C/C++, and moved into the Java world 3 years ago. One of the greatest assets to the Java platform is the self-documentation supported by JavaDoc (that is, comments in the code are used to compile the API reference manual). Granted, your project doesn't conform to the DOC++ commenting syntax, but it should be useful for viewing the class hierarchy and browsing the API.

The word 'Documentation' as used in software engineering, is often used to characterize a number of different documents. Here are the different kind of documents I produce in my position as a lead tech in a software company:

1. Interface/API documentation: Here I normally generate latex from the C++/Java/C sources with DOC++ and publish it as PDF's. I could generate HTML but most of my collegues agree with me that printed documentation are nicer.

2. User Manuals: It varies. troff for man pages, Latex for hardcopies, M$ Word if nontechs has to edit/localize the stuff.

3. Tech Specifications, Software Design Documents: Such documents are mostly used within the company by the tech staff, so I use Latex for formatting and M$ Visio (and sometimes some fourth-generation tools such as Erwin or Rational Rose) for diagrams. It works for me! And these can be put under source control (we use CVS).

4. Collaborative documents: Such as proposals, RFPs, Site Acceptence Test documents that non-techies (Account and Project managers most of the time) has to edit.. For these I use M$ Word/Excel and I must admit I use a considerable amount of time on the things that LaTeX does automaticially for me - that is layout and presentation.

As a rule of thumb I always submit documents as PDFs. Good luck and always remember YMMV!!

many people suggested doxygen (or somesuch), but i'd like to recommend doc++. exact same syntax as javadoc (no learning curve). it will generate html or tex (and thus ps/pdf/etc). it works on c, c++, or java code. http://www.zib.de/Visual/software/doc++/ (v3.2 - original) or http://docpp.sourceforge.net/ (v3.4.x - new maintainers).

The ABC was a special purpose machine for Gauss elimination, the Harvard Mark I lacked conditional branching although it featured loops. The ENIAC was not even programmable through software: the building blocks had to be hardwired in dataflow fashion.

...

As should be clear from the tables [not printed]none of them fulfills all the necessary requirements for a universal computer. We also include the Mark 1 machine built in Manchester from 1946 to 1948, because as far as we know this was the first machine to fit our definition of a universal computer.

Regenerative-memory is not a technical merit of modern technology, it is just a necessity. The Z1 is completed in 1937 which IRC is the construction-begin of ABC. It even employs real binary floating point encoding, whereas ABC used binary fixed point encoding.

The closest thing to a Nobel in computer science is the Turing Award, given by the ACM.

For mathematics, the closest equivalent is the Fields medal.

At first sight the main reason they have for not using an OS license like GPL is that they care about the money they expect to get from commercial licensing... But I doubt it. It really seems to me that they ask companies to pay simply because they are stuck with the idea of "those who can should pay" and so for them OS doesn't seem fair enough. Sadly this seems to be a common critic to OS licenses, don't you agree?

For an interesting example of academic license see the ZIB Academic License which is applied to many mathematical programming software like SoPlex.

At first sight the main reason they have for not using an OS license like GPL is that they care about the money they expect to get from commercial licensing... But I doubt it. It really seems to me that they ask companies to pay simply because they are stuck with the idea of "those who can should pay" and so for them OS doesn't seem fair enough. Sadly this seems to be a common critic to OS licenses, don't you agree?

For an interesting example of academic license see the ZIB Academic License which is applied to many mathematical programming software like SoPlex.

The germans were a little bit faster. The Z2, built by Konrad Zuse was fully functional in 1940/41.

http://waste.informatik.hu-ber lin.de/WW2/zuse_e.html

http://www.zib.de/prospekt/zuse/index .en.html

http://ei.cs.vt.edu/~history/Zuse.html