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World's Oldest Working Computer On Display
riflemann writes: "The Sydney Morning Herald has
an article today about the world's oldest working computer finally
having a permanent place in a Melbourne Museum. It's good to see such
a historical computer, over 50 years old, being put on display permanently." Seeing this makes me remember reading Cryptonomicon - of course, the definition of what's the oldest and working is up for grabs, but as a BA in History, it's cool to see stuff like this put on display for all to see.
I don't think this pheonominum is peuliar to computers. The computer (that is the stored program eclectronic computer) have been around for about forty years.
In 1940 aircraft had been around for about forty years and in 1940 an aircraft from 1935 would have looked postitively antique. I mean two wings! canvas covering! wooden framed! no supercharger! compared with an aluminium monoquoce monoplane with a four valves per cylender supercharged pressurised plane of the 40s.
I really think computer development is in for a big slowdown in the next ten years. The main reason being that in two years time we will have more computing power than we know what to do with. We would have reached this stage already if "modern" computers didn't spend most of thier time running a bloated operating system rather than doing useful work.
Old COBOL programmers never die. They just code in C.
How long were "words" then?
I don't know anything about this machine (I'm a Brit) but machinery of that era often used long words, that would still be a respectable length today. Computers then were mathematical number crunchers, not text processors, so the data word was usually long enough to hold a floating point number in a single word. In the '70s, mini computers started to be dedicated to handling real-time data from A/D converters (often 10 bit) and so they in turn used words of 10 or 12 bits; tailored closely to the size of their most significant external data, not their internal chippery.
Secondly, another poster mentioned mercury being used for memory. This would have been an acoustic delay line, and some of the architectures with those were wholly serial machines - effectively single bit parallel. Only one bit at a time was represented electronically, the rest were being stored as acoustic signals travelling down a pipe full of mercury.
As a complete guess, I'd expect the CSIRAC to be a serial machine with one bit words.
Bytes only become significant when eight bit memory ICs are available as commodity products. The natural word size of the valve and soldered joint is a single bit, so '50s generation kit simply didn't have the same fondness for standardised word lengths that we know today.
Why can't we dig up Turing and put him on display
if you want to see something disgusting, just wait a little longer - the goatse.cx guy will be along shortly.
This is on display at the Manchester museam of science and insdusty and is worth a visit.
I once heard a speech from a (now retired) academic who worked with CSIRAC. He said that the CSIRAC project was scrapped in 1964 because the British Foreign Office had a word with the authorities in Australia and sternly reminded them that Australia had no business doing research not related to mining or agriculture, and such projects belonged in the UK.
Even more fascinating would be if Babbage had played with Faraday's solenoids - it would have been a more interesting bridge between the mechanical to electro-mechanical to electronic world. I suspect that he would have had greater success storing values in solenoid state RAM.
Punch cards could still be used, but there would be a drive to make the solenoids smaller, and perhaps explore magnetic storage a per core memory at an accelerated pace.
I keep pictures of Charles Babbage and Lady Ada on my wall in my cube, and it's amazing how many people don't realize who they are.
I donate all spillover Karma to the charity of my choice... Ada was still a babe despite what people may say...
I've still got a working Sinclair ZX-81 with 2K of RAM -- also had the 16K RAM expansion pack. 'Course now I guess I've dated myself....
load "windows7"
First of all, no I do not want to see anything associated with goatse.cx. I think the next version of SlashCode should have filtering abilities... anybody posting text or a link about goat* should be instead nuked and suffer ping flooding... ;)
Maybe work in something to crash a Windows box if anyone is silly enough to be using one...
I'm not sure about that... I'd assume they mean electronic computers, as abacuses have been in use for much, much, longer than 50 years, and the slide rule was invented in 1895, I believe. However, I believe that even before this "computer" people were using potentionometers to modulate voltage, thereby multiplying and dividing.
Quid latine dictum sit, altum viditur.
Anything said in Latin, sounds profound.
dude...wrong link!
There is no spork.
What he said, but I believe this is more of a replica than a restoration? I seem to remember something about the original being destroyed after the war (to keep it secret).
Hacker: A criminal who breaks into computer systems
"Information wants to be paid"
Dunno - I think there's plenty of room for wanting more powerful processors. Simulations & virtual environments will pretty much eat any amount of power you can throw at them (the more you throw, the better they get). I can also think of some uses for personal-level data mining will which require heavy hp.
No, PPL Utilities, formerly know as Pennsylvania Power has got you covered with 2 nuke plants. *sucks 300A from his 100A service panel and uses his ion gun to explode the neighbors transformer*
They never buried Lenin. He was embalmed, and he's in a case in the Kremlin. You can go right up and look at him. Stalin was in there, but controversy had him moved into another building.
There's actually a whole genre of SF devoted to this...do some Googling on "steampunk".
Because the Smithsonian Insitution has ENIAC and it still works. They rotate parts of it out into display every so often.
Also check out Bruce Sterling's "The Difference Engine". Drags in Lady Ada Lovelace as well.
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
The Difference Engine by, uh, Stirling and Gibson was it? Good book, it explores this idea.
You have to remember also that the Difference Engine was never actually built - That which sets the CSIRAC computer apart from other systems of its time is that it is still maintained in whole. As the article on th SMH rightly points out, other systems of that time have been cannablised as part of their ongoing development.
Rob
Turing was Jewish?
I suppose we could dig up his corpse, they did it with Lenin and he's still there...
Quid latine dictum sit, altum viditur.
Anything said in Latin, sounds profound.
The first fully functional program-controlled electromechanical digital computer in the world (the Z3) was completed by Zuse in 1941, but was destroyed in 1944 during the war. Because of its historical importance, a copy was made in 1960 and put on display in the German Museum ("Deutsches Museum") in Munich.
Next came the more sophisticated Z4, which was the only Zuse Z-machine to survive the war. The Z4 was almost complete when, due to continued air raids, it was moved from Berlin to Gottingen where it was installed in the laboratory of the Aerodynamische Versuchanstalt (DVL/Experimental Aerodynamics Institute). It was only there for a few weeks before Gottingen was in danger of being captured and the machine was once again moved to a small village "Hinterstein" in the Allgau/Bavaria. Finally it was taken to Switzerland where it was installed in the ETH (Federal Polytechnical Institute/"Eidgenossisch Technische Hochschule") in Zurich in 1950. It was used in the Institute of Applied Mathematics at the ETH until 1955.
Cryptonomicon was great, has stephenson written anything since then that is any good.. My bookshelf is looking a little dry atm and I need some new books. Will be getting all the ender series after reading the first one [which blew me away, great book], can anyone suggest some other good books? -sol btw, asimov owns all ;P
nemof
Uh.. a Beowulf cluster of these (or any similar antiques!) would probably bring down the power grid in the entire state!
Imagine the scene at the power company -
"Oh *shit* the computer museum's doing a demo again - quick! bring Three Mile Island back online - NOW!"
Do you suppose that Turing would have wanted to have his rotting corpse displayed?
Alan Turing naked and petrified?
No, thanks.
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Men with no respect for life must never be allowed to control the ultimate instruments of death.
GW Bu
Hey Eniac:
CSIRAC's in position.
Soon we begin the endgame.
Your pal, Hal 9000
Not that's what I'd call imaginative naming. ;-)
--
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
Konrad Zuse worked in Nazi Germany. That could mean something.
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Men with no respect for life must never be allowed to control the ultimate instruments of death.
GW Bu
You'd have a hard time finding anyone today who could surpass the intricacy of some clockwork and steam powered mechanisms they made.
Not at all true. There is no human who can possibly match the precision of a seven-axis laser-guided computer-controlled milling machine. With these amazing (and huge!) devices you basically create a 3D mathematical model (using curves, not polygons), provide a set of hints as to the sequence in which it should shape the metal and press GO. It will machine any shape you'd like to tolerances of billionths of an inch and do it in minutes.
Sure there were clever engineers and highly-skilled craftsmen, but computers can manipulate far more complex shapes than any human and no matter how light your touch is on the micrometer you'll never match laser interferometry for precise measurements.
SciAm published a report a few years ago on the scientists and engineers who constructed a working replica of Babbage's difference engine. They had a difficult time doing it and by the time they were done they'd had to machine many parts to tolerances that were probably unachievable without modern machining technology. It's *possible* that with enough money and enough determination Babbage could have got the thing to go, but the conclusion of the SciAm article was that it's not very likely.
--
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
I read somwhere (sorry, I've forgotten) that Moore's law would not work with mechanical devices like Babbage's engines.
Doesn't Moore's law partly depend on stuff getting smaller and smaller? Aside from nano wouldn't you have trouble making gear wheels small enough to pack enough of them into a reasonable space?
-- I browse at +5 with stripped sigs
Sure, it could be done, but getting it going again would be like taking the Wright Brothers Flyer out for a test run. It'd be great while it worked, but what happens when you break something - and with a tube computer you *would* get many failures.
If you really wanted a working tube computer, building a replica would be a far more responsible thing to do. At least that way the original would be left intact.
Anyway, what would be the point? We know exactly how the machine worked, we've got an emulator for it, it's preserved so if anyone wants to the the physical layout and engineering techniques available, it's all there, and most importantly real efforts to record the history of the machine have been made while many of the people that were involved in its use are still alive.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
The main reason being that in two years time we will have more computing power than we know what to do with.
640 K should be enough for anyone.
The market for computers is probably 5 or 6 in the whole world.
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Men with no respect for life must never be allowed to control the ultimate instruments of death.
GW Bu
And no, dedicated hardware isn't the be-all and end-all. Compression and decompression might be handled by special-purpose hardware, but special effects (fades, wipes, and the myriad effects that are used routinely on still images with programs like the GIMP) are going to be performed on general-purpose CPUs.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
Lenin is actually not in the Kremlin per se but is on display in a mausoleam in Red Square, adjacent to the Kremlin. The room is only open for brief periods each weekday and they restict the number of people who can go in there simultaniously so as to stop Lenin from falling to bits. Stalin was never in there.
I used to have a better sig than this, but I got tired of it
No, there were bytes before ICs came into common use. Mid-60s IBM and Burroughs machines were byte-based, and I don't think that they were the first.
My guess is that the adoption of transistor technology (rather than ICs) was the turning point.
Get your teeth into a small slice: the cake of liberty
Those were the Colossus machines, the high-speed, electronic but not-quite-stored-program code-breaking devices that Turing helped develop at Bletchley Park. Churchill ordered that these (there were several) were to be broken up into pieces 'no larger than a man's fist'. The precise reason for vandalising these ugly but historic beasts has never been satisfactorily explained.
my grampa's older than 50!
"Ask me about Loom"
This is definitely cool... I hate to see any sort of technology go to waste. Hell... I have a Commodore 64 and a Commodore PET sitting downstairs.... at least I'll be able to tell my kids "See what WE had to put up with when we were 8 years old? REAL hackers don't need 4GB of RAM..." ;)
It doesn't work, it's just intact. There's actually an archival issue here. Do we keep CSIRAC "as it was", or do we restore it to working (and keep replacing valves as they burn out at the rate of at least one per day)?
When I was at the University of Melbourne, we were lucky enough to get a guided tour by one of the original members of the computational machinery laboratory. It's quite easy to see how the meme of the computer as ominous "electronic brain" took hold when you can literally walk through it.
CSIRAC not only had a hard disk (one platter, with a motor which delivered such low torque that you needed to put some pressure on the drive belt with a screwdriver to get it to spin up; I believe one of the engineers still has the screwdriver), but it also had a high level language, the interpreter for which fit in its (off the top of my head) 768 words of memory.
Oh, and another anecdote: When CSIRAC lived in The University of Melbourne, it was first housed next to the particle physics laboratory, which caused some scheduling problems, because CSIRAC wouldn't work when the cyclotron was firing. They also had difficulty with the mercury memory in hot weather, but I suspect all the early computers had that problem.
sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f(q{sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f});
Not that it's directly relevant, but I just have to suggest Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age, as it deals with (neo) Victorians and (micro) mechanical computers, both of which you mentioned. Hemos also mentioned Cryptonomicon in the /. story, which is one of Stephenson's other books... Damn, he's a good writer.
One thing I have always wondered about historical computing is the "what if" question. In this case, what if Babbage had got commercial success with his difference engine? I have wondered just how advanced a purely mechanical computer could be. What if the Victorians had thrown boundless cash at mechanical computers. Just how advanced could we reasonably hope these computers to be? I am most interested ;)
--Anticipation of a New Lover's Arrival, The
The Difference Engine was not a programmable computer in the modern sense of the word. This biography explains that the Analytical engine, which Babbage designed but never built, would have been a real programmable machine.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
I realize "the world's oldest computer" makes for a good show piece in a museum, being inanimate and all, but I personally would rather see more recognition being given to the people who forged the revolution and not just the objects the people built. As someone who got started with IBM not too long after they did the translation hardware for the Nuremburg trials (back before "business machines" meant "computers"), I still get some weird looks in this industry dominated by young upstarts. Why can't we dig up Turing and put him on display? That'd be a lot more informative than a hunk of springs and diodes, if you ask me.
If you ask me... People don't seem to ask me much anymore. Please?
Read the rest of this comment...
...electronic digital computer... Let's not be platform-biased.
Don't forget the work of Charles Babbage, such as his Difference Engine. I'm sure there were other computers before this one that still work (I think one of Babbage's still does).
Can it run Linux? If it don't run Linux, I don't give a crap.
"Downloading"?? Whoa, sonny, are you from the future or sumthin'??? Back in the day.... ;)
BTW, where was CSIRAC when I was in Melbourne for CALU? :-(
A beowulf cluster of these... would still be slow. However, it would be bigger than my house!
um.. I done, you can stop reading...
I am become Troll, destroyer of threads
Because Turing was gay, and The Establishment won't allow gay people to be perceived as heroes.
Any homophobe who uses a computer is a hypocrite.
--
Andrew Oakley - www.aoakley.com
I assume that they might crank it up from time to time but why not leave the thing going? Perhaps it could be the machine that cracks RC5 or, even better, Seti@home. Irvu.
At http://www.cs.mu.oz.au/csirac/csirac.html there's a slightly more complete history than i've managed to find anywhere else.
I mean two wings! canvas covering! wooden framed! no supercharger! compared with an aluminium monoquoce monoplane with a four valves per cylinder supercharged pressurized plane of the 40s.
Hmmm, I wonder if anyone ever told Geoff DeHavilland he was behind the times with the Mosquito (aka The Flying Sofa, because it was made of wood & canvas by furniture crafters) during WWII. And I wonder if anyone from 418 Squadron (or any of the other Mosquito squadrons) ever realized it, either. Anything I've ever read about it praises the plane for its adaptability (everything from "night intruder" to "light bomber"), handling, and general airworthiness, although one author does relate that the Mosquito did have an occasional tendency to come unglued. (Ooops... Well, on the other hand, so do we all...)
Interrobang, callously disregarding Karma as usual
I'm not a geek, I'm just a clever script.
The Science Museum has successfully built part of Difference Engine No. 2 and is now working on its printer.
Ask me if I've been required to disclose any crypto keys.
Hey! that could be put to use somewhere as a server or something! Why store it in a museum? Tis perfectly useful! I could hollow it out and use it as a bedroom!
Also.....i still have an old Tandy 1000 that I still use every now and then...no reason to kill old computers..there is always some use for them. (even if it is for a coffee table to to sit on)
The anti-salmon
...this is providing, of course, that it doesn't run Windows 1949. (That version took five minutes just to go to the Blue Screen of Death.)
"In its day CSIRAC was a marvel, but today any decent desktop computer can do more work in 30 seconds than CSIRAC did in its entire 15-year service."
If we take decent to mean any computer that can get about 20 FPS (that is to say, consistantly playable performance) in Half-Life, and this sentence to NOT mean a LOT more work...then this machine would get about 40 frames per year, or about .00000127 frames per second. Enough maybe to play against someone traveling near the speed of light, I guess.
Ahhh, but how long does it take to compile 2.4.0 on it? :-)
There are 10 kinds of people; those who know ternary, those who don't, and those now hunting for a dictionary.
How did he manage with a computer whose memory could hold only 2,000 bits of information - about as much as a couple of e-mails?
Does "bit" here mean "binary digit" as we know it today, or does it mean a discrete piece of information, such as a character or opcode? How long were "words" then? 2000 bits won't even contain the headers of a "couple of e-mails". Did they mean "bytes", or did they mean this kind of e-mail:
Subject: [no subject]
Date: Sat, Dec 23 2000 22:30:01 -0600 (CST)
From: 1337h4xx0r15840924@aol.com
To: subscriptions@hotsluts4u.com
Mee to!
Surely that counts as the 'world's oldest working computer'.
;)
Go on admit if you were living a few thousand years ago you'd look pretty geeky with an abacus
Even better the Abacus was patent free
The difference engine - William Gibson and Bruce Sterling
Deleted