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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
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"
(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 !)
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
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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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.
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.
Konrad Zuse built a programmable binary computer in 1941. It even had floating-point support! You can read about it in English or German.
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.