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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.""
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?
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.