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Rebuilding Colossus
mclock writes "I've just been to a website claiming that the British Colossus was the first computer :
"As 1996 was the 50th anniversary of the switch-on of ENIAC I made sure that Colossus was rebuilt and working in Bletchley Park, just as it was in 1944. There has been a stunned silence from across the water!" See the excellent site for the full story on the rebuild of Colossus in 1996." We've done a couple pieces on ENIAC before, and recently had the declassfication of Colossus 2 info. Like I said in the earlier ENIAC piece, there's a lot of debate as to the first machine: The German's had Zuse, US with ENIAC, Britain with Colossus. Me, I'm going with the abacus.
"As 1996 was the 50th anniversary of the switch-on of ENIAC I made sure that Colossus was rebuilt and working in Bletchley Park, just as it was in 1944. There has been a stunned silence from across the water!" See the excellent site for the full story on the rebuild of Colossus in 1996." We've done a couple pieces on ENIAC before, and recently had the declassfication of Colossus 2 info. Like I said in the earlier ENIAC piece, there's a lot of debate as to the first machine: The German's had Zuse, US with ENIAC, Britain with Colossus. Me, I'm going with the abacus.
But even before that, Konrad Zuse built the Z1 in 1936, that also used relays and read input from punched film.
Larry Gonnick's The Cartoon Guide to the Computer has some interesting info about this history.
The debate is about a few things. One of them is bragging rights.
:)
Colossus was the key to cracking the other German code, which was based on the Baudot code. Unlike their German counterparts on land, the Navy was on the ball and knew that the cipher had weaknesses. They had books, which were printed red on pink paper, which had all the transmission codes. (These were the 'secret keys'.)
This also meant that, unlike the Army's use of Enigma, there was no 'initial marker' which could be cracked to determine the key to encode.
For enigma, they had a machine which was able to, with the application of human know-how (meaning: because of the way enigma worked, you could tell which letter was excluded from the possible space, excluding 1,951 possible starting patterns.
The two Colossus machines were designed by a post-office engineer.
This was for bragging rights, plain and simple. ENIAC was two years after Colosssus, and the reason ENIAC was given credit was because that was unclassified.
(Colossus was hidden until the 70's.)
And one more thing: Colossus' speed was limited by the speed of input. It was set to 5k cps to prevent injury
I used to be someone else. Now I'm someone better.
Real life is underrated.
Also in contention for the distinction of being the first digital computer is the Atanasoff-Berry Computer built at Iowa State University between 1939 and 1942 by John Vincent Atanasoff and Clifford Berry. Supposedly, Atanasoff conceived the plan of the machine drinking bourbon in a roadhouse bar somewhere in Illinois in 1937.
In 1973, after a lengthy court trial, a federal judge declared the Eckert-Mauchly (Eniac) patent invalid and named Atanasoff the inventor of the first digital computer. It should also be noted that it was the first digital computer to use dynamic RAM. Lots of good information on the ABC and many more links can be found here and also here. Photos and diagrams can be found here.
If one closely examines this period of history, they find that it is a time that is just chock full with all kinds of convergences between mathematics, physical science, engineering and materials technologies that make the digital computer almost inevitable. After all, this is a device that had been conceived of, at least in part, as early as the Victorian age and the birth of the industrial revolution. Really, it was just a matter of time before somebody produced a working model, and as so often happens many people took different paths to the same end.
Man, you'd think after blowing all my moderator points modding up references to the ABC at Iowa State on the story last week, Hemos would know better.
I guess after posting stories nobody bothers to read the comments?
To summarize:
The ABC was the First Electronic Digital Computer.
It had several signifigant advances which directly relate to modern day computing:
- Regenerative memory
- Binary(base-2) number system
ENIAC used a decimal(base-10) number system, not binary.
ENIAC was signifigant as a large general purpose computer. Colossus was signifigant as a large code breaking computer.
But the designation of First Electronic Computer belongs to neither.
Steve
Iowa State Alumni, Computer Science
I have to agree with this.
I toured Colossus (from the inside out, as I mentioned in my post on the recent declassification story), and as far as I could gather, the machine was not designed to be reconfigured in any way. It was a five-channel search engine for correlations in an input tape, typed out the correlation coefficients on a typewriter using solenoids, and that was that. No reconfiguration possible.
If you demand that a computer be programmable, I don't think Colossus qualifies. On the other hand it's one damned impressive piece of hardware, no argument there.
. The abacus probably existed in Babylonia (present-day Iraq) about 3000 B.C.E. The ancient Greeks developed some very sophisticated analog computers. In 1901, an ancient Greek shipwreck was discovered off the island of Antikythera. From http://obiwan.uvi.edu/computing/timeline/history.h tm
The ancient Greeks developed some very sophisticated analog computers. In 1901, an ancient Greek shipwreck was discovered off the island of Antikythera.
Inside was a salt-encrusted device (now called the Antikythera mechanism) that consisted of rusted metal gears and pointers. When this c. 80 B.C.E. device was reconstructed, it produced a mechanism for predicting the motions of the stars and planets.
eat shiat and bark at the moon
So, does this one still want to talk to Goliath?
John
In other news, Steve Jobs announced that, compared to the Colossus, the G4 is "twice as fast" using standard 1944 Bytemark benchmarks.
--
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
but then, someone with a testosterone overdose will get into it "yes we were!", "No we were", etc.
[sigh]
Let's just give credit where it is due....
- - - - - - - -
"Never apply a Star Trek solution to a Babylon 5 problem."
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
Anthony E Sale is Hon FBCS ex Museums Director, Bletchley Park (the person who saved the historic Bletchley Park buildings from demolition and was the single greatest force behind making it into the fascinating cryptography museum it is today)
Here is the blurb:
" Allied cryptographers in Bletchley Park had an enormous impact on WW II. Tony Sale will first describe how the German Enigma cipher was broken, first by the Poles, and then by the code breakers in Bletchley Park using the remarkable contributions of Alan Turing. He will then discuss the breaking of the German Lorenz code with the Colossus, the world's first large electronic computer.
He will also relate some of the many anecdotes about life in Bletchley Park, which had 250 people in 1939 but exploded to 12,000 people by the end of the war.
Tony Sale has had careers in electronics, intelligence (with MI5), and (since 1963) in computers. He started the Bletchley Park Museums and the Colossus rebuild in 1993, and was Museums Director until 1999. He has lectured and written widely on the history of cryptography and computers, appeared on television, and served as a consultant for ``Breaking the Code'' and the soon-to-be-released film version of Robert Harris's book ``Enigma.''"
Tony will also be giving a talk on "Tackling 10^20 size search spaces with pencils, wheels, wires tubes: Code breaking in WW II " at MSRI in Berkeley on the 20th. (this will be a technical talk for mathematicians and cryptographers)
I think he will also be doing some speaking at Stanford..but I don't know when or where..
I dont understand what the debate is. None of these computers was the first. To find the first true example of a computer you have to look at Babage's machine. Sure, it was never completed -- but that's perhaps the most important quality it had -- it was also the first example of vaporware!
Since Ada Lovelace is considered the first computer programmer, shouldn't the machine she wrote for be considered the first computer?
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Iowa State had the ABC (Atanasoff/Berry Computer) in 1939. ENIAC's designers based part of their work on the ABC, and in fact the ABC was central to the voiding of some of UNIVAC's (the commercial offspring of ENIAC) patents as the outcome of a 1973 court decision. Many people credit John Vincent Atanasoff as the father of the electronic digital computer.
computer. If I have it right, the American machines were very easy to
reconfigure machines, that performed computations from an electronic
memory, but their instruction set was not Turing complete. The Zuse
machine had a Turing complete instruction set, and so would get my
vote for first computer, but it wasn't until the Bletchley machine
that code and data resided in the same memory space, which is of
course a very important aspect of modern computer design.
Choose your criteria to get your favourite machine to win...