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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.
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.
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.
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});
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
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?
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...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).
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