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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.""
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
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
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
(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
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
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?
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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.
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?
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
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
It is believed, for example, that considerable advance warning was available about the invasion of Crete, but the Allied command were prevented from acting on it because that would have revealed that the German encryption had been cracked.
Andy Armstrong
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?
Except if they do a good enough job of classifying something in the first place then it may stay hidden for a very long time.
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.
...any one who read cryptonomicon knows that a waterhouse invented it during wwII.
wait, no! that was a joke!
-Peter
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 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..."
------
Let me give you the lowdown
--
Cryptinomicon, while an entertaining book, is fiction
In a Forest Gump kind of way.
Browser? I barely know her!
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.
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.