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First Digital Computer Dates back To 1944
swcox writes "Security restricted information on the first digital (semi) programmable computer has been released.
A brief story and links to blueprints can be found in an article by the UK's Daily Telegraph. And for more details: Colossal code of silence broken
Dr Donald Michie, at Edinburgh University, said: "Some will be startled to know that by VE Day Britain had a machine room of some 10 high-speed electronic computers on three-shift operation round the clock.""
Anyone else consider the possibility that this might, by some off chance, be an english propagandic lie directly related (and in a vain attempt of support and background for British ingenuity concerning technology) to the recent hyperlink patent news by British Telecom? Or am I just crazy?
After I have received the wisdom of good teaching, I will untiringly teach all people. - The Teachings of Buddha
Read about it here. They've even completed a replica model of it (the original one was cannibalized because interest in computers at that time was so low :)
I/O Error G-17: Aborting Installation
Somthing to do with engineering at the time.
try to make ends meet, you're a slave to money, then you die
Yes, but it can be argued that the work Colossus performed had a major impact on WW2 and certainly influenced the length of the war, and quite possibly decided the victor...
So whilst it can be said that Colossus did not have an input into the history of Computers, it certainly had a major input into real HISTORY.
I'm not sure about the impact of Collosus on later events, but whilst it may not have influenced computing, it is more than possible it heavily influenced British codebreaking development. If we hadn't got such a bad spying record with Blake, Philby etc, perhaps we gained ground in the field of codebreaking...
Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!
Karma: Chameleon
Hodges has a web site on which he uses the Bomb to argue that Turing more or less invented the modern computer. Of course, Hodges is less than objective, since he sees Turing as a sort of poster boy for oppression of gay mathematicians.
One interesting aspect of Hodges's book is the implication that Turing's suicide was actually a case of official murder. He doesn't say this outright -- either his evidence is too weak, or he's cautious about living in a country that can legally void due process.
__________
Vikings did settle in North America (no, I'm not of Scandinavian descent).
It's actually WRNS (no English) but it IS pronounced wrens - like the wee birdie.
Yes, of course, it must be true because a federal judge ruled it so! The US court system is infallible. OJ Simpson didn't make a public mockery of it on television. Between 1/5 and 1/7 of those sentanced to death aren't found to be innocent after execution.
There is enough reasonable doubt to ignore this ruling if you consider the facts. The most likely party who could contradict this ruling was the UK government. It's unlikely that they would interested or even bothered to participate in such a court case. At the time, any of their potential evidence was still sealed and classified. This whole court-case was about the promotion of the self-serving interests of a corporate entity (well, corporate entity might be the wrong legal term, but I hope the intention of the statement is clear.)
As a bad analogy: if a federal judge from the Russian Confederation ruled that the Soviet Union discovered the first atomic bomb, would you care or even be mildly interested. Probably not, and the same goes for this ruling.
Besides, who *really* cares where the first computer was invented? Judging by the number ofd jingoistic, ego-building, irrelevant posts, I would rather we didn't know. It really makes no difference to our lives. It's just turning into a pissing competition along nationalistic lines.
Not surprising that NSA has a fab, especially for me since I used to work there. The fab (known as the SPL, or special projects laboratory) is, quite understandably, actually used mostly for manufacturing in-house designed chips designed explicitly for cracking encryption via brute-force. It's quite decked out, with a single pour stable foundation, and clean room specifications similar to .25 micron industry standards last time I was there (last year). Costs major $$$, but one of these special purpose devices sure beats a bunch of general purpose devices, even parallelized. p.s. They also have their own supercomputer facility for just this purpose, but now this is going way OT
Who is General Failure? And why is he reading my disk????
The United Kingdom gave the Enigma technology to France, for example. They used it routinely for diplomatic and military encryption until 1973. It makes you wonder what else is to be revealed that we don't yet know...
And the same man who axiomatized quantum theory, provided us with one possible (not ZF)axiomatization of set theory, proved the spectral and ergodic theorems, originated game theory, developed fundamental economic equilibrium growth models and came up with too many mathematical theorems and papers to list. There's a nice biography by Norman McRae(sic?). Unfortunately I forget the title...
There's a nice anecdote about Von Neumann. He was asked the "brain teaser": two trains are on a collision course 1 mile apart. Both trains are going 10mph. There is a very scared bird flying 20mph back and forth between the two trains, turning around and flying in the opposite direction when it sees that it is about to be hit by one of them. How far does the bird fly before it goes splat? This is not a brain teaser if you note that the trains will collide in .05 hours and a bird going 20mph will fly 1 mile in that time. However some mathematicians can be tricked into treating the bird as a point which is going faster than the trains and can turn around instantly and, hence, makes an infinite number of reversals before the trains collide. One way to find the distance is to add up an infinite series for the distance for each trip back and forth. Mathematicians are predisposed to do this the hard way. When Von Neumann was asked this question he immediately came up with the right answer. When his friend asked him "So you know the trick?" he said "What trick? I just summed the infinite series."
You're half right. The chip was in develop when the first PII's were brought out and AMD finally solved the floating point issue. Soon later they released the K6-2's that had this fix. At that time frame they were in dev for the K7. At which point they knew Intel was going to release a new chip, no one knew what it was called, or how it worked/what it could do. But AMD had to be prepared for it. Which is why thier were reports of the K8/9 when the K7 500 was first released.
I don't believe they are / or the current models have ever been referred to as the K8/9; however.
"Imagination is the only weapon in the war against reality." -Jules de Gautier
Plainly ridiculous - we all know that America leads the world in everything. You've read Brave New World, haven't you?
Not to mention the multi-pass arrangement of cards, colour coded so they knew which was which - successive approximations to override errors!
Mark
Keeper of the Wedding Shenanigans Home Page
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Because British stuff is only automatically de-classified 50 years after initially being classified. Sometimes it's de-classified sooner, but if it's considered too sensitive they don't until after 50 years when it has to be revealved by law.
First, it isn't digital,
No it was digital, that's rather the point. Did you mean something else?
Sailing over the event horizon
It would be interesting to see how these machines all "fit-together" in history. I.E. which ones were the first to develop each feature. As Atanasoff himself once put it:
"I have always taken the position that there is enough credit for everyone in the invention and development of the electronic computer"
"Atanasoff-Berry computer was the first digital computer. It was built by John Vincent Atanasoff and Clifford Berry at Iowa State University during 1937-42, and introduced the concepts of binary arithmetic, regenerative memory, and logic circuits."
-- http://www.cs.iastate.edu/jva/jva-archive.shtml
INTERACTIVE
great comedy company.
...would it run Quake (or at least Wolfenstein 3d)?
(from the Iowa State University Web Site):
"The Atanasoff-Berry computer was the first digital computer. It was built by John Vincent Atanasoff and Clifford Berry at Iowa State University during 1937-42, and introduced the concepts of binary arithmetic, regenerative memory, and logic circuits.
On October 19, 1973, US Federal Judge Earl R. Larson signed his decision following a lengthy court trial which declared the ENIAC patent of Mauchly and Eckert invalid and named Atanasoff the inventor of the electronic digital computer -- the Atanasoff-Berry Computer or the ABC.
Clark Mollenhoff in his book, Atanasoff, Forgotten Father of the Computer, details the design and construction of the Atanasoff-Berry Computer with emphasis on the relationships of the individuals. Alice and Arthur Burks in their book, The First Electronic Computer: The Atanasoff Story, describe the design and construction of the ABC and provide a more technical perspective. Numerous articles provide additional information. In recognition of his achivement, Atanasoff was awarded the National Medal of Technology by President George Bush at the White house on November 13, 1990. "
The story as I remember told in one of the books is that the creator of the ENIAC visited ISU during the development of the ABC and "borrowed" many of the concepts of the ABC for the ENIAC.
Unfortunately, Iowa State never fully realized what Atanasoff and Berry had developed.
As a Chemistry Professor at ISU told me "If they had, our toliet seats would be gold plated".
Iowa State recently built a working model of the ABC to prove that it really did work.
Check out thisWeb Site for more info.-Neil Johnson (Proud to be a Cyclone !)
by the time he got to the z80, though, things were sure cooking.
--saint----
The first computer was designed by Charles Babbage in 1882.
Babbages analytical engine is not a true computer, in the modern sense. It isn't fully programmable because it it not Turing-compatible. There is a large set of programs that you can run on your Intel box that the analytical engine couldn't compute.
Although he never built one, a unviersty did from his original 1822 designs in the early 90's and it DOES work.
I believe you are thinking of the Science Museum in London, which built a replica of Babbage's difference engine. Thhe difference engine is a much simpler machine that is a sophisticated mechanical calculator. It is certainly not a computer. The Science Museum are considering building a replica of the analytical engine, but haven't started work onit yet.
Sailing over the event horizon
Didn't Michaelangelo have the idea if not the plans for a mechanical adding machine?
Yes, but an adding machine is not necessarily a computer. There were many mechanical and electro-mechanical calculators available before the first electronic computers. IBM had a flourishing business making such beasts long before WWII.
I know the idea isn't anywhere near new. What it really comes down to is how we classify the word "computer".
There is a precise and definitive answer to this question. Alan Turing's famous paper "On Computable Numbers" proposes the logical foundation for all computing machines. Take a look at this page on Andrew Hodges' web site. If you want to dive in to it, buy Hodges' excellent biography of Turing. Another great source of information on the mathematical basis for all computation is Douglas Hofstader's tour de force book "Godel, Escher and Bach". If you really want to understand computers you have to understand Turing's work.
Sailing over the event horizon
ABC was using vacuum tubes, not relays. Some of these tubes are on display in Durham Hall in Iowa State along with the memory drum. Also there is a working replica of the computer, full with vacuum tubes. The electromechanical part was the drums containing the programs -- similar to a punch card, like a music box.
Collossus was not used to decypher enigma codes.
This had already been done by some polish mathematicians, and later by Turing and his "bomb". (Electromechanical decyphering device)
The collossus was used to decypher encrypted teletext transmissions. The transmissions were encrypted with pseudorandom numbers. Due to a mistake during one transmission by the germans (they send the same message twice) the english were able to figure out the generator polynom. The collosus was used to correlate encrypted transmission with this generator polynom.
Oh well, I am not sure whether it was really a LFSR PRN generator, but at least something similar.
Wasn't Colossus declassified some time ago?
If your children ever found out how lame you are, they'd murder you in your sleep
If I remember correctly from my 8th-grade Algebra book, Pascal had actually built an adding machine...
Not sure, though. Anyone have any thoughts on other mathematical geniuses whose extensions on 1+1 overshadowed inventiveness paralleled recently?
What's this Submit thingy do?
I keep seeing this recurring theme that the purpose of continued classification is probably due to the technology..
Has it occured to anyone else but me that perhaps these things remain classified in order to prevent the deduction of the methods they used to get those technologies? Perhaps they have some procedure that allows them to perform research somewhat more efficiently than anyone else, and that procedure is what they're keeping secret..
Personally, I think this may be a case where correlation of declassified data is more of a security risk than the actual data itself..
What's this Submit thingy do?
Remember, even ENIAC was digital, but it wasn't binary (it was base-10). I don't quite remember which one was the first binary computer (was it UNIVAC?), but this didn't come along until about the mid-50's (if I'm right.)
"Ancillary does not mean you get to rule the world." --U.S. Circuit Judge Harry Edwards, speaking to the FCC's lawyer
Has anyone read this book by Neal Stephenson called Cryptinomicon? The last part of the book was all about this. The first computer apparently was supposed to be dedicated to de-crypting Japanese codes.
This is similar to the Enigma story -- both codebreaking teams benefited from sloppy procedure by Axis radio operators. The German military suspected a leak, but took it on faith that their encryption was unbreakable. So instead of looking for flaws in their communication procedures, they went on a witch hunt for spies and traitors. There's a lesson in this -- I hope.
By the way, I assume this is not the same Colossus that tried to subjugate humanity?
__________
To find out how military and civillian computer stuff is related, use Google or Altavista to search for "COTS" sometime.
If you're too lazy to do this yourself, COTS stands for Commercial Off The Shelf. Meaning you can usually get a COTS machine that's cheaper and more capeable than the "secret" alternatives.
Also, for the record, the most of the New Big Machines at those "known government research facilities" consist of several thousand Intel processors all hooked together in cool ways. Use Google to search for "ASCI Red" if you want to know. Also, if you want to know how to program such a machine, use Google to search for "MPI".
Sorry to burst your bubble, but the government isn't competent enough to build or keep secret anything that's signifigantly ahead of what's possible in the private sector.
Did addition and subtraction. No batteries required thanks to the convient hand crank. 1642
This new information indicates Colossus was the first electronic computer, and Colossus 2 the first programmable electronic computer, doesn't it?
The Zuse machines and the ABC from Iowa were not really electronic, but electro-mechanical, like the Mark I at Harvard, using relays instead of vacuum tubes ("valves" in British parlance), according to the computer histories on the net I've seen. Even though many of these electro-mechanical devices used punched tape or card input, they were not necessarily programmable.
According to these stories, Colossus had 1,500 vacuum tubes, while Colossus 2 had 2,500, and there were 10 of the latter by the end of the war (a year after Colossus 2's introduction)--an immense achievement.
This also might confirm that Alan Turing really was the first computer programmer, as others have already indicated.
And it reveals, interestingly, that cracking the Enigma code was not even the main purpose of all this effort, but the other supersecret German military code.
Maybe the next historical revelations will be about the computing power behind the atomic bomb, the first ones and later ones. Were the British computer experts allowed to play a role in this? What were the early Russian computers like?
That was painful to witness.
Browser? I barely know her!
This'll probably break my running record of only score "one" posts, but...
Schmoo!
My step-father was Fire Control on a Navy battleship in the seventies, (Good way to stay out of Vietnam, I guess.) and he described to me the computer equipment they had on board:
Magnetic-core memory...Loop of iron that could be assigned a binary value, but would lose that value as soon as that address was read...
Schmoo memory...The equivalent of ROM. The loop of iron had another, permanent magnet attached to it, to restore its magnetic state as soon as the data was read.
The RAM banks consisted of a fine network of wires basically(from what I gather) providing a coordinate system of access to the memory...however, this network was so complex that the manufacturing process had to be done by hand and suffered a 99% fail rate.
The 'computers' they used were progrogrammable, although they were basically a huge tree of electromechanical relays..gosh, there's just too much for me to remember to type.
Now, how much of this is exadgeration (sp) I don't know...
What's this Submit thingy do?
And even before that, in the '30's, Dr. Atanasoff and his graduate student Berry gave their initials to the ABC at Iowa State, which was electronic and digital. Programability left a lot to be desired, though :) [It solved sets of 17 equations in 17 unknowns].
This was the computer that led to the invalidation of the ENIAC patents--many were for things already done on the ABC, which the ENIAC designers had axctually examined.
Two replicas of the ABC were built, one to tour, and one to live in the Smithsonian. One was fired up to solve a problem.
hawk
p.s. scrounge around http://www.iastate.edu to find lots of articles and pages onit.
but for the parts, which were turned into a bit of this, and a bit of that, iirc.
.]
ONce the ABC solved the set of equations it was built to solve, everyone pretty much lost interest . . .
hawk, harumphing at the idea that it was electromechanical--though memory was on rotating drums of capacitors, a breakthrough in and of itself . .
Not magnetic-core, no. However, the drums of capacitors were the first regenerative memory.
I think the history of computers is just as important as the current information and technology. Its was only 10 years ago that people were still using separate controller cards for Hard drives and Floppy drives, bus mice and other such devices.
How many people in the computer field really know about the history of computers? It may not be a requirement to use one, but I think in order to be considered an expert (A+, MCSE, etc), maybe they should include a little history aswell.
Maybe thier should be a hardware database, with pictures and specs on the internet. Or maybe even a separate database from the Internet, create another ARPNET (consult history books for that one too).
[Side note: A+ does include history to a certain extent, but there were computers before Intel; and contrary to what my current A+ manual states, NEXT GEN did not develop the K7 to compete with the Pentium II, AMD developed it and it was to compete with the Pentium III]
"Imagination is the only weapon in the war against reality." -Jules de Gautier
John Vincent Atanasoff and Clifford Berry were the first. Just becase their computer never took off for much other than solving differential equations, doesn't mean it wasn't the first.
Atanasoff Berry Computer
bash-2.04$
bash-2.04$yes "Don't you hate dialup connections?"| write USERNAME
But really, we have to remember that this was in wartime. Money really was no object. After WWII, Bletchley Park was entirely dismantled, and the GCHQ moved on to other things. (Like discovering RSA -- but that's not like quantam computing: the first is insight, the latter engineering) While they might make insightful breakthroughs, things like Collosus and bletchley require maassive funding (not to mention employee loyalty), and probably don't happen much in peacetime.
This is why all the griping over the enigma machine handouts makes so little sense: it really took a massive effort to break a well organised enigma network back then, several thousand people. Neither Britain nor anyone else were going to devote that kind of effort to one minor cypher used in friendly or post-colonial countries. Of course, with computers coming into wider use, it got much easier...
He who fights and runs away,
Colossus and Zuse's machine were built before the ABC was completed in 1942.
---
What people have to realize about historical events is that they are only meaningful if they influence later events. While Canadians and Americans of Scandinavian descent like to bring up Leif Erikson as the first European to discover the New World, the simple fact is that his discovery (if indeed it occured) was meaningless because it did not lead to anything. Columbus' discovery lead of course to European colonization and therefore it was significant.
Similarly, Colossus did not lead to the evolution of today's computers, as it was classified in the early days of computing Even the ABC is only significant because it may have influenced the design of the ENIAC, which was the ancestor of every computer now in use.
Imagine a beowolf cluster of them
I just closed my eyes, and saw a nuclear power plant, with cooling towers and everything.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
There's a lon g excerpt online.
I have to throw in my favorite Alan Turing story. During the war, he was sent on a secret mission to the US. Since his work was very sensitive, he was ordered to take no documents on the trip. Turing being Turing, he interpreted this order quite literally -- he left behind his passport and identity papers. Imagine the reaction of an Immigration officer approached by a Brit just off the boat, with no proof of identity, claiming to be on a secret mission....
__________
I wrote my history thesis on an aspect of the Manhattan Project, and I remember looking through John von Neumann's papers at the Library of Congress. It looked like he was working on some interesting computer ideas while he was at Los Alamos. That wasn't the topic of my thesis, so I didn't really pay attention, except noting to myself that someday I want to look into it further.
Anyone know more about what von Neumann was working on? That also would have been the early-to-mid 1940's.
A quick glance at _The Making of the Atomic Bomb_ by Richard Rhodes reveals this:
"Such work could not be done reliably by hand with desktop calculation machines. Fortunately the laboratory had already ordered IBM punchcard sorters to facilitate calculating the critical mass of odd-shaped bomb cores. The IBM equipment arrived early in April 1944 and the Theoretical Division immediately put it to good use running brute-force implosion numbers. Hydrodynamic problems, detailed and repetitious, were particularly adaptable to machine computation; the challenge apparently set von Neumann thinking about how such machines might be improved." (page 544)
Thanks,
ccg at aya dot yale dot edu
Here is a Java bytecode implementation of the Z3. Dr. Dobbs Journal had an article on it in their Sept. 2000 issue.
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
Hmm... Atanasoff has/had the patent on electronic digital computing. I got dibs on the vacuum-tubeless binary photonic computing patent! If Rambus hasn't already beat me to it. ;)
I've heard the opposite in a biography of the creators of ENIAC. That Astantoff stole ideas from ENIAC. There was a huge debate and a court case and ENIAC lost.
But all that means is that Astantoff swung the court case, possibly with big bucks from Sperry.
I'm not sure what the actual truth is. We all know how malleable the court system is when lots of money is involved, and this certainly wouldn't be the first time that the true inventors of something (the ENIAC guys:Presper Eckert and John Mauchly) were passed over in favor of the big ego and bigger checkbook.
-Illserve
Cause the Master's message to the universe got thwated by the 4th Doctor but he fell and had to regenerate cause Adrick and Tegan got caught and couldn't save him in time. Thanks for all your help Brigadiere.
... the court case could be part of the reason it remained classified. People don't go to court to prove who did something first unless there's money involved too (meaning the technology had worth in the US.)
There's really little point in advertising your level of technical advancement, since patents and secrecy are mutually exclusive. Better to be secretly ahead of others instead of flaunting it in their face (especially if you cant extort money out of the runner ups in your technology race.)
Also, invalidating the ENIAC patents would simply lead to more competition in the US. (certainly not in the UKs best interest.)
--
Some people have a way with words, and some people, um, thingy.
I think the moral of this, and other posts on this article is pretty clear - there was no revolution where some guy 'invented' the computer, it was all a series of evolutions.
Determining who created the first computer is like determining who was the first human. It simply depends on how widely you cast your net.
Those giants you're standing on the shoulders of are awfully tall. Which is not to diminish the achievements of the people involved.
I've also had a chance to see Tony Sale's reconstruction of Colossus. He's published a little booklet with a description of the process used to figure out the design, and in that he says that all the blueprints and other technical information on Colussus was destroyed after the war; his reconstruction was put together from a handful of old photographs, a few scraps of paper, and interviews with a couple of the original developers (though I don't remember seeing the name of the fellow quoted in the story). After all that reverse engineering, this new report must have been a bittersweet moment for him -- had it been released a few years earlier, he would have had a much easier time of it (but perhaps not as much fun...)
The first computer was designed by Charles Babbage
in 1882. Although he never built one, a unviersty did from his original 1822 designs in the early 90's and it DOES work.
This page has a nice summary:
http://www.maxmon.com/1822ad.htm
Now I remember. They were also the first to use magnetic-core memory, weren't they?
"Ancillary does not mean you get to rule the world." --U.S. Circuit Judge Harry Edwards, speaking to the FCC's lawyer
the site will be a full on human solutions site; meaning, all the problems you've got with other folks - we'll help you take care of 'em - from revenge to lovelife, etc., and it will be launched two months after in a slashdot-style community where users will dictate the editorial, thereby creating a many-to-many community where individuals can be entertained and get the solutions to those pesky problems they need (facts within fiction context).
INTERACTIVE
great comedy company.
..also known as ABC, constructed in 1942 at Iowa State University. It's such a shame the ENIAC overshadowed this wonderful project. The machine had a precursor of todays Dynamic RAM (used charged capacitances to store digital information).
Sigged!
I almost agree: Konrad Zuse COULD have been the first, if the Germans had decided to fund his research. But, to be honest, the Z1 is not really a programmable machine, neither was the Z2 or the Z3. The Z1 was actually a purely mechanical device, correct me if I'm wrong.
Nevertheless, Zuse deserves a lot of credit for his work! He was a true hero of the information age. Too bad he was on the wrong side, at that time.
Sigged!
My Grandmother worked as one of the WRENS (Womens Royal English Naval Service), entering the encoded message into the enigma machines for decoding. I did a school project on it some years back.
The Germans' code was an encrypted tesxt message, encoded by a machine known as the Enigma Machine. The Enigma Machine consisted of a series of gears and wheels that would encode the message depending on the setting on the front of the machine.
The English had (relatively) no trouble obtaining a machine, as someone simply stole it from the germans and they copied it. What the computer was used for was to determine the setting needed on the machine to get a sensible message out. I can't actually remember how, but that's what it did.
It was using this that enabled the English forewarning if battles and to determine the positions of the germans.
This is pretty old news, though, The books that I got all this from for my project were old at the time. As far as I know, the information was released thirty years after the event as per legislation.
F4+80y +1++135
FatBoy Titties - (aren't I l33+
Remeber that often quoted IBM prediction from the 1950's that went that worldwide demand for computers would be 9 systems? So this release says they underestimated right from the start. One department in one country had a need by itself for 10.
The mandatory Beowulf cluster gag has been said, so I'd like the blueprints and make one in my basement.
If Mr. Edison had thought smarter he wouldn't sweat as much. --Nikola Tesla
I did AI at Edinburgh, and had Mitchie as a lecturer as few times. I would have actually turned up and listened more frequently if I had known his past - as it is I spent 2 years down the pub, followed by 2 years programming in the bowels of the machine rooms - they actually gave undergraduates keys to the machine rooms full of sun workstations so you could work all night if you preferred (which all the serious guys did - you get more resources at 3.00am).
http://rareformnewmedia.com/
(1) his machines were BINARY. ENIAC was stupid enough to be decimal--this is *extremely* inefficient and accounts for why eniac was so damned large.
(2) he has floating point (oh my god, we americans didn't think of that for years).
(3) his machine wasn't ELECTRONIC. but, it was digital if i know what digital is.... others are confused, since his machine wasn't ELECTRONIC, they assume that his machine was not the first computer. This is wrong, of course. His machines were digital as digital can be, but his switches were electromechanical and not purely electronic. Thought i'm not german (and very american--have no german ancestry, in fact), i want to respect this german genius. He was freaking amazing, and i don't want people to steal his accomplishments. -patrick.
So, Windows 9x goes back further than we thought?
http://fsfeurope.org/
There was a court case to decide this quite a few years ago, after the ENIAC was contested as the first computer. From 1939-1942, John Vincent Atanasoff and Clifford Berry created the ABC, the first digital computer at Iowa State University. 1942 predates Colossus by a bit.
Berry went on to work with the scientists who worked on computers\codebreaking in WWII.
It was shown in the court case that John Mauchley (sp), one of the creators of the ENIAC, actually visited Atanasoff at ISU before building the ENIAC.
Nevertheless, Zuse deserves a lot of credit for his work! He was a true hero of the information age. Too bad he was on the wrong side, at that time.
Sayyyy... could the name of the (German!) Linux distro SUSE have been taken from this guy?
A lot of projects that we view as tech have a human component as well -- like the Pole who stole an Enigma machine for the British to examine. Lengthy declassification periods often reflect the lifespans of those involved, whose governments might not recognize a statute of limitations. Certainly the Soviet government, in that particular example, would have been quite capable of deciding that a Pole who gave information to the British once might do it again, and shoot him.
This next song is very sad. Please clap along. -- Robin Zander
There's a saying among scientists:
The one who got the credit was the last one to have made the discovery.
its interesting to read its old opcode spec list and other tidbits... anyone fancy an emulator?
mercury delay lines and drum storage. yum!
Write your Own Operating System [FAQ]!
no sig for you
Actually, the government seels to classify some things out of sloppy thinking and many things out of embarrasment. I have no idea how much classified material really needs to be classified, but take the following example: The amount of peanut butter that the US Army consumed was classified out of the fear that the Soviets would be able to deduce the size of our army, neglecting the fact that the number of people in the army was unclassified! I suspect that real intelligence work involves extrapolating off known facts more than it does espionage...
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
I thought the standard classification time limit was 50 years a la the Zabruder Film and all that JFK stuff. I don't really know though. That'd be pretty sad if they still thought the tech was a security risk today. It would imply that they did some seriously needed upgrading before the declassication occured.
What's more worrysome for me though is what they have classified that we don't know about. What sort of AI or Quantum Prime Factoring Machine do they have classified now that we'll be hearing about in 2055?
"I'm paranoid I'm paranoid that everybody's coming to get me
Just say ya never met me
I'm running under ground with the moles, livin in holes."
I'm not sick, but I'm not well.
Tony Sale, at the Museum of Cryptography at Bletchley Park, has reconstructed a running Colossus. At the time I visited, he had two out of its five parallel channels up and working (I believe all five are now complete). I asked him a couple of semi-intelligent questions, and he promptly grabbed me by the elbow and dragged me into the Colossus machine room. He stood me in the middle of the frame and pointed out the machine's various sections, then ran over to the side and turned it on around me.
This was exciting on several levels, because it is very much a tube machine - lots and lots of tubes - and they all run at +400 volts plate voltage. I didn't make a whole lot of extraneous movements.
Perhaps the most impressive thing about it, visually (besides all the glowing tubes) is the high-speed paper tape reader that runs a 5-level Baudot tape over and over again in a loop as the machine searches for correlations. The reader's made of machined aluminum (or aluminium, over there), and stands about six feet high. It reads 5,000 characters per second, and the impulses from the smaller feeder holes form the machine clock.
This is an absolute don't-miss if you get to London. Bletchley Park is a fine day trip by train.
No, not the Ninja Turtle.
Didn't Michaelangelo have the idea if not the plans for a mechanical adding machine?
I know the idea isn't anywhere near new. What it really comes down to is how we classify the word "computer".
This was mentioned before. There's a way of listing all users in numerical order. I think someone discovered that the account had been deleted.
Why did GCHQ wait so long to release the specifications to Colosus II (or am I missing something?)
Hmm... I wonder if 'popular' computer science will pay more attention to Alan Turin from now on.
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"The report also contains the blueprint of Colossus 2, an upgraded "production model". "
I'm waiting until the Colossus III mmx version of this comes out. Cause You know how there was a bug in the original Colossus when it came out.
A beowulf cluster of these. Really, really, hot, noisy, and big.
Black holes are where the Matrix raised SIGFPE
Konrad Zuse built a programmable binary computer in 1941. It even had floating-point support! You can read about it in English or German.
Ya it would be the size of New York city, and have all the power of my 386sx running at 16 mhz.
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Some people are alive, only because it is against the law to Kill them!
...any one who read cryptonomicon knows that a waterhouse invented it during wwII.
wait, no! that was a joke!
-Peter
Computers were not invented, they were developed. The Mark I was electromechanical, where the Colossus was fully electronic. That made it much faster. But it was not the first. For a timeline, see - this.
Is it?
Well, actually, it's not.
You see, everywhere you go, you see "digital camera," "digital phones," "digital PDA's," and the really senseless "digital DNA," ect. ect. ect. You've seen it, I'm sure, and it would seem that the term "digital" is quite new, right? I mean, you're taping some game or something with your "digital" camera, and some guy's got a really nice "analog" camera and asks you what kind saying, "what kind of camera you got?" and you say "digital," - and watch his face sulk. "Digital" is cool. "Digital" is sexy. "Digital" is expensive." and most importantly - "Digital is new!"
At least we seem to think so. And it would almost seem our most technologically advanced society has recently invented "digital."
At least that what it seem's right?
Think they knew this? Think the classifiers relented to release this information because then it would make digital seem OLD! Think about that - our lovely new digital devices are based on a concept that is OLD!
Of course, it's a stupid thought. But it's sort of a funny slap in the face.
We like to think we know it all, and God-forbid that we would ever make something brand-new-state-of-the-art that was taken from what we knew 50 years ago.
Are we really as "inventive" as we like to think?
Did they think back then that computer technology wouldn't advance that much in that time so it might still be a security risk today?
Is there a standard period for classification?
I'm impressed. Who manufactured them?
Fsck this hard drive! Although it probably won't work...
foo = bar/*myPtr;
Check out Project Upper/Mute, an all-around awesome compiler fra
People seem to have forgotten Tommy Flowers. The GPO (Now BT) engineer creditied with designing and building the thing.
e rs.html
http://www.redherring.com/mag/issue63/news-flow
Imagine if Steve Woston had been around. The war would have ended years sooner.
Everything is but a number spoken by itself.
Its called a hand (admittedly a 1976 model, but based on a much older desing). 10 digits and I can do all sorts of calculations on them. I can add. I can subtract. I can get a whole load of games such as the highly succesful rock, paper, scissors. I can even interface it with my PC.
I bet it must have been cool to get the first copy of AOL Beta Platinum 0.4 on punch-card tape in the mail.
But it got old quick when they started getting them three times a week. Laster the scientists decided to paper the wall with them.
"If only they were shint and round," they imagined..."
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Let me give you the lowdown
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INTERACTIVE
great comedy company.
There's a pretty good reason why it's similar to the Enigma story ... it *IS* the Enigma story.
The Colossus machine was used at Bletchley Park by Alan Turing (and others!) to crack the Enigma code (before America joined the war just in case anyone believed that film!)
OK, firstly we need to make clear that the project occured between 1937 and 1942. The machine was not built in 1937 - it wasn't completed until 1942. Seeing as the official figures on the kit down at Bletchley Park in the UK appear to put them bringing the first machine up in 1941-ish, the ABC was not the first computer. It was the first computer that could be talked about.
Secondly, let's just clear up this nonsense about court cases proving it was the first computer. The argument was between the builders of ENIAC and the ABC. How likely do you think it is that the UK Government were going to walk into a court room and argue their part on this, espeically as the project was still classified in the 1970's?
You would be amazed at how much stuff is sitting around out there that is only now starting to get de-classified. For example, did you know that public key cryptography is now publically acknowleged as actually having been "discovered" at GCHQ in the UK some significant time before RSA made it out into the big wide world. Just because two commercial entities "prove" in a court which one invented something first, doesn't mean to say that there isn't a western government that actually invented it first, but are keeping it under wraps.
Type "enigma stolen" into the Daily Telegraph search engine, dunno why but copy-pasting the link didn't work. The story makes me wonder how anyone could even think about such vandalism.
Hi Guys, The Small-Scale Experimental Machine, known as SSEM, (aka Manchanter Mark 1 prototype), would appear to be the first electronic binary stored program computer which was able to successfuly run a stored proram on June 21st 1948. The background to this computer can be found at: http://www.computer50.org/mark1/new.baby.html As far as I am concirned, this appears to be the first "computer" that I would recognise. Regards Zed --
When will people learn that the Atanasoff-Berry Computer was built before ENIAC??? I'm so sick of hearing about ENIAC, especially when I have classes all the time in the same building ABC was developed here at Iowa State, years before ENIAC
Kind of makes you wonder just how far ahead of the commercial market the military is regarding computer technology today.
:)
Would be interesting if all our innovations from Intel and clan were really all developed by the government and leaked out.
Seriously though, they may have computers more massively parallel than any known acedemic (or known government) research facility. It isn't too likely they are very far ahead in the speed of a single processor, if they even work on such a thing.
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I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.