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The Computer and the Skateboard
The skateboard? The Computer part of the title is easy: though there are a lot of computers and proto-computers mentioned in the film, the one at its core is the ENIAC, or Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer, the number-crunching roomful of glowing tubes and toggle switches built at the University of Pennsylvania's Moore School of Electrical Engineering in 1944.
So where does the skateboard come in? One clue to the title is flashed on-screen at the beginning of the film, an intriguing snippet from the ill-fated Omni magazine, which asserts that both the computer and the skateboard are artifacts which "accidentally dispose a culture toward anarchy." While that's a intriguing, enigmatic idea, there's another more concrete reason why he put "skateboard" in the title.
Though it's recounted only skeptically by the film's living subjects, there's a story that Mauchly invented the skateboard -- wheels mounted on a plank, as classroom apparatus rather than recreational transport -- and this claim is part of what inspired the film. David says that he "began research for this documentary around 1995 when a longtime friend mentioned casually that his granddad built the first computer. A couple of weeks later he told me that he also constructed the first skateboard. The computer thing was kind of impressive but the skateboard --that's really something." Mauchly certainly wasn't riding halfpipes, but in an alternate universe, he'd probably be a good candidate.
Mauchly didn't create the ENIAC on his own, of course: academic collaborator and eventual business partner J. Presper Eckert (his name contributed half the name of their Mauchly-Eckert Computer Co.) was an electronic genius in his own right, and would be worthy of a documentary all to himself. An enthusiastic corps of programmers, engineers and others helped, too, as did generous Army funding for the project -- but the ENIAC's conception belongs to Mauchly.
Cast of Characters Since he began researching the film in 1995, David managed to meet with many of the key participants in the history of ENIAC, and each of them fills in some of the story.
- Joe Chapline, technical writer, Eckert-Mauchly Co. Chapline calls ENIAC "The second miracle of Philadelphia," and muses aloud whether the electronic computer or the forging of the United States Constitution has had the greatest impact. Chapline played a key role early in the development of what would become ENIAC by introducing the Army to his inventor friend Mauchly, and then later by writing the ENIAC's specification document (all from diagrams, and according to Chapline in a single burst of intellectual clarity) which allowed programmers to exploit its potential.
- John Mauchly's widowed wife Kay Mauchly. Kay Mauchly (introduced on-screen only as "programmer") is one of the stars of the film, describing matter-of-factly in several of the interview segments the steps which led her husband from early investigations in meteorology to the creation of ENIAC and the machines that followed. Mrs. Mauchly is no outsider looking in: she was one of the handful of women recruited by the to work on the Army's differential analyzer, soon to be supplanted by Mauchly's electronic analyzer. Once Mauchly and his brainchild became involved, she became one of the machine's first programmers, and this is how she met her eventual husband.
- Through the miracle of videotape, John Mauchly himself. Though Mauchly died more than 20 years ago, he's represented in the film with clips taken from a 1977 videotaped interview, as well as in newsreel footage from decades before.
- Mitchell Marcus, professor of artificial intelligence at Penn. Mitchell is one of the few subjects in the film who did not participate in ENIAC's creation, but his lucid explanations of Mauchly's machine architecture is a welcome addition.
- A number of other Mauchly friends and associates who tell stories about Mauchly's enthusiastic shepherding of his years-long project.
"He ran into a problem, and that was the students who were copying the data didn't always copy what they saw, and if they were using an adding machine they didn't always copy down the exact answers they got, they sometimes reversed the numbers and so on. So he thought, 'Gee there must be some way we can develop some kind of a computing machine' -- well, he didn't call it a computing machine -- 'but any kind of a machine where there would not be so much operator intervention.'"At the same time, there were some of his student friends who had been students with him at Ursinus College, who had gone into nuclear physics. They were in the process of counting cosmic rays, which occur about one million per second. How were they doing this? They were doing this by little electronic counters which they made themselves, using electronic tubes. So John went to several of their laboratories and observed this going on, and his feeling was 'Hey, if you can count cosmic rays, then you can count anything. It doesn't make any difference what you put into the machine.'"
This insight led him to construct his own counting devices at Ursinus, also using vacuum tubes. On video, Mauchly recounts his thoughts:
"If you can count, [if you can] distinguish pulses which are occurring at rates which are sometimes as close together as a millionth of second ... If you can keep track of these things, it seemed obvious to me that those same abilities of vacuum tube circuits could be used for just the mere act of computation. Generate your own pulses your own way, not have them necessarily become the result of some measurement of nature's cosmic rays or nature's nuclear experiments. Just generate your pulses on purpose to represent numbers. and then you get these counting circuits, or scaling circuits as they called them, to operate on these numbers, get them to multiply and divide as well as add and subtract. Why not? And nobody had any answers to that 'Why not?'"In the summer of 1941, Mauchly took an electronics course at University of Pennsylvania, which is where he met J. Presper Eckert, who was in charge of his electronics laboratory course. Because Mauchly had already learned on his own many of the things taught in the course, he and Eckert found themselves free to spend most of their class time talking computers and tinkering. The Moore School offered Mauchly a teaching position after that summer, and he accepted.
Like many other colleges and universities, the University of Pennsylvania shifted focus in the early 40s from pure academics to the war effort. An Army team from the Aberdeen Proving Grounds moved in to take over Penn's Differential Analyzer in June 1942, and things began to speed up. The Differential Analyzer was a huge mechanical calculator which the Army was using to do trajectory calculations, one by tedious one.
Kay Mauchly recounts: "When Mauchly saw what the Army was using the differential analyzer for, he thought 'Oh my goodness, that's the sort of thing they could use for my computer, if they could ever get it built."
Prompted by his friend (and then-boarder) Joe Chapline, in 1942 Mauchly proposed applying his expertise with electronics to speed up the calculations being done by the Army -- an analyzer built with tubes would be far faster than any mechanically operated one. The proposal was accepted by Lt. Herman Goldstine, who headed the Aberdeen team. Mauchly and Eckert set to work, and the result was the ENIAC, a massively parallel computer that could manipulate numbers faster than any alternatives then available.
Patent Fight In 1946, the war over, the Army decided to publicize their electronic marvel, and institutions all over the world began to inquire whether they could build ENIACs of their own -- and the Moore school was suddenly famous. Looking beyond academic uses, the University of Pennsylvania saw the commercial possibilities of electronic computers. Irven Travis, a professor who had returned from his wartime service in the Navy to resume his position overseeing all patents at the University, pressed the two to sign over the commercial patent rights.Given 10 days to sign away their rights to commercial production of similar machines, Eckert and Mauchly balked. The Moore school fired the pair -- and though they had no jobs to go to, they soon created jobs by forming their own company in a building on Philadelphia's Walnut street. Eckert and Mauchly's decision to go off on their own ended up clearing much of the department, because many of the brightest faculty decided to go with them. Even with uncertain prospects, they knew that Mauchly and Eckert were onto something.
Professor Mitchell describes the firing and subsequent departmental losses as "as fundamental error that we're still recovering from." The details of this fight are reason enough to seek out this movie for their insight into the value (and difficulty) of preserving the rights to one's own work.
The rest of the story. The company that the two stubborn Penn professors founded was called Electronic Controls Company, and in 1948 renamed Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation (EMCC). Among other things, the company introduced the world's first magnetic (rather than punchcard) computer storage. No matter how innovate, though, business was thin -- not surprising in a world where digital computers were still more curiosity than necessity -- and was sold in 1950 to Remington-Rand. Rather than ENIAC, the machines the company made now were called UNIVAC.
Mauchly left the company to form yet another (Mauchly Associates), and to head two more companies (Dynatrend and Marketrend) before his death after surgery in 1980.
This isn't Wargames. The Computer and the Skateboard is not a fancy movie in content or presentation. The story is laid out plainly, not padded with teases -- the drama is mostly in the background. The actual actors may not be universally humble, but they seem too down-to-earth to make a big deal about contributing to the Allies' victory in World War II, or changing nearly every aspect of the modern world.
There also aren't many special effects, outside of a funky sci-fi sounding background audio track; transitions between scenes are simple, and most of the interviews are quite static; the viewer is left to interpret the subjects' words on his own, with no Leonard Nimoy intoning conclusions or trying to smooth together different aspects of the narrative. David is obviously limited in parts by the quality of the original sources he was able to track down (especially the audio), and it's to his credit that he let these segments stand, because they add historical glances which might otherwise remain locked in company vaults.
The style and subject matter taken together mean that (no surprise) this film has a niche audience. I doubt my sister would much enjoy it, but my electrical-engineer father sure got a kick out of it. Watching this movie is like watching an intelligent professor tell a story without overtelling it -- your concentration will be rewarded.
The film is available for institutional viewing at $295 and at a lower price for home video. The title is also available in university libraries and repertory video stores. Readers interested in the ENIAC's history may also want to look at this excellent collection of documents available from IBM, one of the many good online resources available.
http://www.blastoffmedia.com/mauchly/
It sounds neat, and I'm sure my dad would get a kick out of it too. But how do we get a copy?
Any sufficiently simple magic can be passed off as mere advanced technology.
Next on dateline:
Tony Hawk rolling an eniac on the worlds largest skateboard.
at least the skateboard anyway, this article disputes that... Otherwise, great review, though I wish there was a link to somewhere else that has screenshots or more info on the documentary itself. (perhaps a link to order it?)
anime+manga together at last.. in real time.
When will it be available for free on the internet? oh wait, nobody is supposed to know about that....
Lysergic Acid Diethylamide, not just chemistry, reality!
maybe if you mispronounce broccoli as broccly...
MARIJUANA, SHROOMS, X: ONLINE?! - E
I don't know which is more distressing; the assumption that nobodies knows about the ENIAC or the failure to mention the Atanasof Berry Computer, which was where Eckert and Mauchly got the idea.
Please, keep cranking 'em out (just so long as they don't make you plug "Revolution OS" again. *g*).
and it is really fantastic!! The backbone of the film is commentary by Mauchly's widow Kay, who was hired as a young mathematician to do calculations on the brand new ENIAC and fell in love with its inventor. One of the original "Women of the ENIAC "--the world's first computer programmers --she shares her lucid understanding of computer history along with intimate biographical anecdotes to provide an insider's picture of the the project's genesis and progression. Excellent film! I highly reccommend it!
http://www.cs.iastate.edu/jva/jva-archive.shtml
The actual definition of computer is by no means clear. One of my lecturers measured early computers by three critera:
...and er, something else. It was a few years ago you know.
Conditial-branch
Stored program
Anyway, if my memory serves, ENIAC required physical reprogramming (i.e. with wires), it wasn't the kind of machine you could load a program into from punch cards or tape.
Similarly early machines like Babbage Diffenetial Engine, Bombes, Collusses et al, wern't 'proper' computers either. The earliest by that measure would be the Manchester Mark I although the slightly later Cambridge EDSAC was much more useful from a practical stand-point.
AC.
And as far as the digital computer part goes, the work at Bletchley Park gets too little praise, because it was conducted during World War II under conditions of extreme secrecy. They did, however, use a computer to crack the "unbreakable" Enigma code, enabling many victories for the Allies.
They're running low on funding, by the way, and it's a great museum--you should consider helping.
Jouster
"Like on the X-Files. ROSWELL STYLE!"
-----------------------
You are what you think.
The Computer and the Skateboard
... If you can keep track of these things, it seemed obvious to me that those same abilities of vacuum tube circuits could be used for just the mere act of computation. Generate your own pulses your own way, not have them necessarily have them become the result of some measurement of nature's cosmic rays or nature's nuclear experiments. Just generate your pulses on purpose to represent numbers. and then you get these counting circuits, or scaling circuits as they called them, to operate on these numbers, get them to multiply and divide as well as add and subtract. Why not? And nobody had any answers to that 'Why not?'"
Posted by timothy on Wednesday April 24, @22:30
from the looks-like-colonel-sanders dept.
Lots of people and institutions have apparently good claims on the invention of the digital computer, and many more when that's reduced to just a broader definition of "computer." Few though have a better claim to what we think of as a digital computer than John Mauchly. Not as famous as Turing or von Neuman, and with his name no longer on any current computers, it's likely you've never heard of Mauchly (rhymes with "broccoli") -- but you almost certainly have heard of his most famous machine, and the first general-purpose large-scale electronic computer: the ENIAC. Filmmaker Paul David sorted through decades of newsreel footage, old videotape from the vaults at UNISYS and photo archives, and shot hours of new interviews with many of the people who watched and participated in Mauchly's quest. The result is a documentary film which lets the players tell their own stories: it's put together so smoothly that no omniscient narrator appears, or needs to. If you're interested in the history of computing, technology in general, or even World War II, The Computer and the Skateboard is engrossing. (Read on for more.)
The skateboard?
The Computer part of the title is easy: though there are a lot of computers and proto-computers mentioned in the film, the one at its core is the ENIAC, or Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer, the number-crunching roomful of glowing tubes and toggle switches built at the University of Pennsylvania's Moore School of Electrical Engineering in 1944.
So where does the skateboard come in? One clue to the title is flashed on-screen at the beginning of the film, an intriguing snippet from the ill-fated Omni magazine, which asserts that both the computer and the skateboard are artifacts which "accidentally dispose a culture toward anarchy." While that's a intriguing, enigmatic idea, there's another more concrete reason why he put "skateboard" in the title.
Though it's recounted only skeptically by the film's living subjects, there's a story that Mauchly invented the skateboard -- wheels mounted on a plank, as classroom apparatus rather than recreational transport -- and this claim is part of what inspired the film. David says that he "began research for this documentary around 1995 when a longtime friend mentioned casually that his granddad built the first computer. A couple of weeks later he told me that he also constructed the first skateboard. The computer thing was kind of impressive but the skateboard --that's really something." Mauchly certainly wasn't riding halfpipes, but in an alternate universe, he'd probably be a good candidate.
Mauchly didn't create the ENIAC on his own, of course: academic collaborator and eventual business partner J. Presper Eckert (his name contributed half the name of their Mauchly-Eckert Computer Co.) was an electronic genius in his own right, and would be worthy of a documentary all to himself. An enthusiastic corps of programmers, engineers and others helped, too, as did generous Army funding for the project -- but the ENIAC's conception belongs to Mauchly.
Cast of Characters
Since he began researching the film in 1995, David managed to meet with many of the key participants in the history of ENIAC, and each of them fills in some of the story.
Joe Chapline, technical writer, Eckert-Mauchly Co. Chapline calls ENIAC "The second miracle of Philadelphia," and muses aloud whether the electronic computer or the forging of the United States Constitution has had the greatest impact. Chapline played a key role early in the development of what would become ENIAC by introducing the Army to his inventor friend Mauchly, and then later by writing the ENIAC's specification document (all from diagrams, and according to Chapline in a single burst of intellectual clarity) which allowed programmers to exploit its potential.
John Mauchly's widowed wife Kay Mauchly. Kay Mauchly (introduced on-screen only as "programmer") is one of the stars of the film, describing matter-of-factly in several of the interview segments the steps which led her husband from early investigations in meteorology to the creation of ENIAC and the machines that followed. Mrs. Mauchly is no outsider looking in: she was one of the handful of women recruited by the to work on the Army's differential analyzer, soon to be supplanted by Mauchly's electronic analyzer. Once Mauchly and his brainchild became involved, she became one of the machine's first programmers, and this is how she met her eventual husband.
Through the miracle of videotape, John Mauchly himself. Though Mauchly died more than 20 years ago, he's represented in the film with clips taken from a 1977 videotaped interview, as well as in newsreel footage from decades before.
Mitchell Marcus, professor of artificial intelligence at Penn. Mitchell is one of the few subjects in the film who did not participate in its creation, but his lucid explanations of Mauchly's machine architecture is a welcome addition.
A number of other Mauchly friends and associates who tell stories about Mauchly's enthusiastic shepherding of his years-long project.
A timeline twisted by war.
John Mauchly's research into weather patterns in the 1930s required some of his students (he was teaching at Ursinus College) to tediously enter logged weather data by hand, an error-prone process under the best of circumstances. Kay Mauchly describes the key insight that led to the development of the digital computer:
"He ran into a problem, and that was the students who were copying the data didn't always copy what they saw, and if they were using an adding machine they didn't always copy down the exact answers they got, they sometimes reversed the numbers and so on. So he thought, 'Gee there must be some way we can develop some kind of a computing machine' -- well, he didn't call it a computing machine -- 'but any kind of a machine where there would not be so much operator intervention.'
"At the same time, there were some of his student friends who had been students with him at Ursinus College, who had gone into nuclear physics. They were in the process of counting cosmic rays, which occur about one million per second. How were they doing this? They were doing this by little electronic counters which they made themselves, using electronic tubes. So John went to several of their laboratories and observed this going on, and his feeling was 'Hey, if you can count cosmic rays, then you can count anything. It doesn't make any difference what you put into the machine.'"
This insight led him to construct his own counting devices at Ursinus, also using vacuum tubes. On video, Mauchly recounts his thoughts:
"If you can count, [if you can] distinguish pulses which are occurring at rates which are sometimes as close together as a millionth of second
In the summer of 1941, Mauchly took an electronics course at University of Pennsylvania, which is where he met J. Presper Eckert, who was in charge of his electronics laboratory course. Because Mauchly had already learned on his own many of the things taught in the course, he and Eckert found themselves free to spend most of their class time talking computers and tinkering. The Moore School offered Mauchly a teaching position after that summer, and he accepted.
Like many other colleges and universities, the University of Pennsylvania shifted focus in the early 40s from pure academics to the war effort. An Army team from the Aberdeen Proving Grounds moved in to take over Penn's Differential Analyzer in June 1942, and things began to speed up. The Differential Analyzer was a huge mechanical calculator which the Army was using to do trajectory calculations, one by tedious one.
Kay Mauchly recounts: "When Mauchly saw what the Army was using the differential analyzer for, he thought 'Oh my goodness, that's the sort of thing they could use for my computer, if they could ever get it built."
Prompted by his friend (and then-boarder) Joe Chapline, in 1942 Mauchly proposed applying his expertise with electronics to speed up the calculations being done by the Army -- an analyzer built with tubes would be far faster than any mechanically operated one. The proposal was accepted by Lt. Herman Goldstine, who headed the Aberdeen team. Mauchly and Eckert set to work, and the result was the ENIAC, a massively parallel computer that could manipulate numbers faster than any alternatives then available.
Patent Fight
In 1946, the war over, the Army decided to publicize their electronic marvel, and institutions all over the world began to inquire whether they could build ENIACs of their own -- and the Moore school was suddenly famous. Looking beyond academic uses, the University of Pennsylvania saw the commercial possibilities of electronic computers. Irven Travis, a professor who had returned from his wartime service in the Navy to resume his position overseeing all patents at the University, pressed the two to sign over the commercial patent rights.
Given 10 days to sign away their rights to commercial production of similar machines, Eckert and Mauchly balked. The Moore school fired the pair -- and though they had no jobs to go to, they soon created jobs by forming their own company in a building on Philadelphia's Walnut street. Eckert and Mauchly's decision to go off on their own ended up clearing much of the department, because many of the brightest faculty decided to go with them. Even with uncertain prospects, they knew that Mauchly and Eckert were onto something.
Professor Mitchell describes the firing and subsequent departmental losses as "as fundamental error that we're still recovering from." The details of this fight are reason enough to seek out this movie for their insight into the value (and difficulty) of preserving the rights to one's own work.
The rest of the story.
The company that the two stubborn Penn professors founded was called Electronic Controls Company, and in 1948 renamed Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation (EMCC). Among other things, the company introduced the world's first magnetic (rather than punchcard) computer storage. No matter how innovate, though, business was thin -- not surprising in a world where digital computers were still more curiosity than necessity -- and was sold in 1950 to Remington-Rand. Rather than ENIAC, the machines the company made now were called UNIVAC.
Mauchly left the company to form yet another (Mauchly Associates), and to head two more companies (Dynatrend and Marketrend) before his death after surgery in 1980.
This isn't Wargames.
The Computer and the Skateboard is not a fancy movie in content or presentation. The story is laid out plainly, not padded with teases -- the drama is mostly in the background. The actual actors may not be universally humble, but they seem too down-to-earth to make a big deal about contributing to the Allies' victory in World War II, or changing nearly every aspect of the modern world.
There also aren't many special effects, outside of a funky sci-fi sounding background audio track; transitions between scenes are simple, and most of the interviews are quite static; the viewer is left to interpret the subjects' words on his own, with no Leonard Nimoy intoning conclusions or trying to smooth together different aspects of the narrative. David is obviously limited in parts by the quality of the original sources he was able to track down (especially the audio), and it's to his credit that he let these segments stand, because they add historical glances which might otherwise remain locked in company vaults.
The style and subject matter taken together mean that (no surprise) this film has a niche audience. I doubt my sister would much enjoy it, but my electrical-engineer father sure got a kick out of it. Watching this movie is like watching an intelligent professor tell a story without overtelling it -- your concentration will be rewarded.
The film is available for institutional viewing at $295 and at a lower price for home video. The title is also available in university libraries and repertory video stores. Readers interested in the ENIAC's history may also want to look at this excellent collection of documents available from IBM, one of the many good online resources available.
Here's the link
m
http://www.blastoffmedia.com/mauchly/contact.ht
it's put together so smoothly that no omniscient narrator appears, or needs to
At least, serious ones don't. Discovery/PBS/etc documentary shows do, but that's because they're just news/information shows, not real documentaries.
really it all started with a liitle game called guess what the germans are saying
fly over find out what the weather is then PROGRAM your computer to crack the code
now thats a computer
http://www.bletchleypark.org.uk/
bad website but donate there
picture
http://www.retrobeep.com
have fun but really dont forget where it all came from
regards
john jones
Few though have a better claim to what we think of as a digital computer than John Mauchly.
Does that mean he passed the reverse turing test?
The shareholder is always right.
Though its parent company did its darndest to fool the American public (and apparently timothy) into thinking that the ENIAC was the "first general-purpose large-scale electronic computer", it wasn't, not by a long shot. That honor goes to John Atanasoff and the University of Iowa, whose computer design was essentially ripped off and were subsequently pooh-poohed by Univac.
Also, ENIAC was hardly "large scale".
I'm really curious about this, as my grandmother tells about how she won a skateboard at a school raffle around 1929. It was a commercial product by that point... so when did he "invent" it? -he couldn't have been all that old in 1929.
Americans can't quite get to grips with the fact that they didn't invent the first computer,
its a shame but its true, and it seems they will try what they can to twist the real facts with "editing".
Next they will claim they invented the Enigma code breaking machine and they won the World Cup as well as think that Vietnam was a successful military mission
yeah mod away, just cos you disagree doesn't mean im wrong
It would have sucked to live back then: millions of dollars for a computer you couldn't even play Wolfenstein on, for Chrissake!! :-)
But yeah, the ENIAC was the first completely digital computer. I really don't think it was the first computer. There were many computers before that, but they incorporated things such as mechanical relays.
The Collosus, for ex., was built early in WW2 to crack codes. I believe, correct me if I'm wrong, that it was a combination of relays and vacuum tubes.
It's really hard to draw the line on what we would consider as a computer. Personally, I consider the definition of a computer to be any device that accepts programs. If a computer had to be digital, which would make the ENIAC the first one, then things like optical computers and quantum computers wouldn't fit the definition of computers.
Anyway, if you consider a computer to be any calculating device that is fully programmable, the German Z3 Computer fits the bill.
I have always thought computers such as the ENIAC were worthless because their vacuum tubes burned out all the time and they had no video display. Only printed output. That is kind of a hinderence for speedy work.
At least I don't think the ENIAC had a digital display. Correct me if I'm wrong.
Another disadvantage of these early computers is that vacuum tubes are slow. Computers really didn't start to become practical until the late 50's and early 60's, when transistor computers came into use. Transistors made computers cheaper, faster, smaller, and more reliable.
If you don't understand any of my sayings, come to me in private and I shall take you in my German mouth.
Kid's have been nailing rollerskate wheels onto boards for... probably as long as there have been rollerskates. My father talked about doing this when he was a kid in the thirties. I don't think he had any illusion that it was original, even at the time.
On the other hand, making the jump from counting to calculating with tubes is beautiful, even if he was one of several men who invented the computer at different times and places.
Assembly is the reverse of disassembly.
There was a legal dispute between Atanasof and Mauchly over who held claim to "the first fully electronic computer." My father was a junior lawyer on the case. Atanasof won, though my dad is firmly convinced he shouldn't have. The crux of the issue was over which machine was "fully electronic." The Atanasof machine used spinning cylinders with pins for memory. As I understand it, the physical position of the pin determined its state. The Mauchly machine used vaccuum tubes for memory. I suppose it amounts to so much legal hairsplitting, given that modern disk drives have spinning disks in which we "reposition" magnetic particles, but in this case were talking about storage, not memory. My dad still has his file on the case, unfortunately it's 300 miles away so I can't scan in anything and post it.
Here's another good Zuse resource. Has background/biographical info, simulations/replicas of his machines, and an archive of his papers.
So we have to pay money for this video... at university libraries? Something doesn't add up.
and muses aloud whether the electronic computer or the forging of the United States Constitution has had the greatest impact.
Man, that has to be a joke. The constitution of the US revolutionized the concept of freedom throughout the world. It's hard to imagine how long it would have taken to get where we are if we hadn't had a "virgin land" to try the Great Experiment in self-government by the people.
On the othe hand, the computer is certainly a significant invention, but with very few exceptions, there is almost nothing we can't do without computers by going back to index cards in filing cabinets. [there are certainly notable exceptions, like weather predictions, certain areas of scientific research, etc]. Computers have certainly made lives more efficient, but it's hard to argue that they have revolutionized anything.
I think it's worth noting that the atomic bomb was created totally without computers (although they did have some primitive calculating machines. Again, efficiency, not necessity).
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
I maintain that the first useful computer was this baby!
python -c "x='python -c %sx=%s; print x%%(chr(34),repr(x),chr(34))%s'; print x%(chr(34),repr(x),chr(34))"
Well, technically, neither does the EENIAC, but the best intrumental band ever did a kick-ass song called "Theme from EEVIAC" (Embedded Electronic Variably Integrated Astro Console), which is probably one of their best. If you think you'd like "sci-fi surf rock" (as I usually describe it), check it out.
--
#nohup cat
I'm thinking we got into space with their help. I'm thinking we built some skyscrapers that we might not have built, and some other types of machines. We've executed at least one mathematical proof by exhaustive cases that I imagine we could not have managed without them. I'm thinking too that Quake 3 would be damn hard to play with paper and pencil.
Of course, since they execute instructions and implement algorithms, we generally have to be able to describe a situation, which means we have some idea how to solve it. This often means it could be done another way. But that's like saying the wheel lets us move stuff from A to B and we could've done that without it. Which is true, but not a useful statement. The real thing that computers do is let us do many things more easily, which is true of many machines that we have created (which is all a computer really is until they get true intelligence from one).
And worldwide, I suppose it is debatable at this point which has the greatest impact... the US Constitution (which is probably a bit over-rated) or the Computer (similarly so). Given 200 or 300 years, I think the answer will clearly be on the Computer's (and its descendants) side.
Of course, I'd need a really powerful computer to do any kind of accurate projection.... *grin*
-- Mal: "Well they tell you: never hit a man with a closed fist. But it is, on occasion, hilarious."
a beowulf cluster of these things?
A band by the same name.
was invented in Muskegon, Michigan by the Brunswick corperation in 1950's known as the Snow Snurfer.
... a small-michigan town created the most popular snow shredding device in the USA and most of the world.. not some wierdo in colorado that said dude alot and liked to ski.
So Nyah
Im sure ENIAC wasn't expecting this!
This sounds like a great movie, but, technically, ENIAC was not a true computer because it was not digital, and used vacuum tubes instead of electrical circuits. However it did pave the way to modern computers as we know them.
Format desired:
VHS Beta DVD Other
8-)
Let us not forget our history. There is a tendancy in the states to believe that the US was the first democracy to grace the earth's surface. Well it wasn't.
The Venetian republic was a stable and powerful democracy for hundreds of years before the new world was discovered. They got the idea from the Romans who got the idea from the Greeks.
The constitution is important, but not at the level you american punters think.
as some of the other posters have pointed out...e sign.html
just as there's more to a computer than a collection of tubes that can preform numerical calculations there's more to a skateboard than nailing four wheels to a 2x4. refer: http://www.exploratorium.edu/skateboarding/skated
for more details...
or come watch me and da boys shread a pool, for some first hand demonstrations.
use Signature::Witty;
Check out the book "ENIAC" by Scott McCartney (ISBN 0802713483), published in 1999. He covers the entire story in detail, from the early beginnings, to the Sperry vs. Honeywell patent suit, to the differences between ENIAC and Atanasoff's machine. McCartney, in fact, mentions viewing 12 hours of videotape of Mauchly made by Esther Carr. I would imagine this is the same footage Paul David used.
DMCA - Chilling free speech since 1998.
I have always thought computers such as the ENIAC were worthless because their vacuum tubes burned out all the time and they had no video display. Only printed output. That is kind of a hinderence for speedy work.
...
Read 'Hackers'... much good work was done via teletype back when CRT displays were an oddity. Definitely less useful than CRT's, but working in line editor mode is passable
Even though I am an ISU grad, I had always been skeptical of the ISU's claims about the ABC. I had always considered it a case of two smart people coming accross the same idea independently.
:)
However, my mind was changed after reading several accounts that Mauchly VISITED the Iowa State University Campus and spent a considerable amount of time pumping Atansoff and Berry about their device PRIOR to building the ENICAC. Seems pretty fishy to me.
I think Atanasoff and Berry got screwed, but as for Leadership at Iowa State University, they blew it ! As much as they try to claim credit for it now, they basically ignored the ABC and shoved it to the basement of the physics building.
As an ISU professor once told me, "If the college had realized what they had at the time, we'd have gold plated toliet seats on campus now".
Of course the bar in illnois where Atansoff concieved the idea ought to really be the place to claim the credit
Technically, the US constition wasn't all that revolutionary at all. It was essentially a synthesis of previous democratic experiments (mentioned by other replies) mixed with the Philosophers of John Locke (or need we forget, "Life, Liberty, and Property"). At best, the Constitution might be described as a "proof of concept" document, derived from the various contractarian Philosophers (Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, etc).
In fact, the US has been democratic _long_ before the revolution took place, which is why the transition to democracy was so easy in the US. All the states had been governing themselves democraticly for hundreds of years. Don't forget, colonists first started showing up in the new world in the 1500-1600's, and the revolution didn't take place until the late 1700's. Furthermore, the first Constitution (the Articles of Confederation) failed miserably.
Lets take this further. If you look at virtually every other "Democratic" country in the world, they don't run their country anything like the way the US does it. Instead of this wacky US Presidential system, most countries tend to use Parlimentary systems, which in turn are prone to having higher turnout, better ability to implement policy, quicker response times, higher stability, and are generally agreed to be a better system.
The only reason to think that the US Constitution is such a great thing is because you are a US citizen and have been raised under the myths that this is the greatest country on the planet. Not to be belittling, but every country has those myths. Everyone has their claim to fame, and use it to claim that they're the best people on the Earth. That's also not to say that everything your country tells you is just a lie to increase your patriotism, some of it may be true. Just don't swallow it whole. Be critical of everything, and determine what you believe for yourself.
As for the influence of computers? They have, for a fact, revolutionized data collection, number crunching, and communication. Never before could you get the daily newspaper from anywhere in the world the very day that the paper came out. It was never possible to create virtually uncrackable encrypted messages in real time, and transmit them across the globe. Never before was it possible for a camera to look at your face and determine if you were likely to be a criminal. This is all in just a few years.
So...what's more important? A synthesis of existing concepts that came about as a second attempt and was never successful again any place else in the world? Or a magic box that has radicalized how life operates the world over?
Did anyone else read the headline and first think of Y.T.'s most excellent plank?
Dyolf Knip
Thanks. I knew they started to have some teletype by the time CRT displays became more common. But with the earlier versions of the UNIVAC I always thought it was just punch cards and/or the old way of programming by plugging cables in and shit. My knowledge of early computing is woefully lacking.
Did you know that I not only swallow cum, but that given the chance, I'd guzzle it by the gallons? It's true. Sure, my ass may be hairy and smelly, but isn't your girlfriends?
Let's see how low that karma can go! Karma is -4.
..it was created sometime around 600bc
At least I don't think the ENIAC had a digital display. Correct me if I'm wrong.
Another disadvantage of these early computers is that vacuum tubes are slow. Computers really didn't start to become practical until the late 50's and early 60's, when transistor computers came into use. Transistors made computers cheaper, faster, smaller, and more reliable.
Vacuum-tube computers were certainly inferior to their transistorized successors, but they were far from worthless. While vacuum tubes were prone to burning out, the problem could be managed. People devised special test equipment and testing procedures to guard against tube failure. Careful preventative maintenance could keep a system running well despite the limits of tube reliability. Good machine design could also avoid needless stress on the tubes, greatly improving their reliability and extending their life.
The funny thing is that the electronics establishment in the early 40s thought that electronic computing machines were not feasible for the same reason you mentioned--tube reliability. One of Eckert's greatest achievements was to figure out and demonstrate how to build a computer out of thousands of vacuum tubes without it being crippled by the limits of tube reliability. (Mauchly wasn't involved with this aspect of ENIAC; he left the nitty-gritty details of circuit implementation to Eckert.)
As for the speed, expense, and size of vacuum tubes, remember that they were competing with electromechanical relays, not transistors, and they were far superior to the relays. Vacuum tube machines made many previous intractable problems solvable in a reasonable amount of time for those who had enough money to make use of them. And in the late 40s and the 50s, there was an ever-growing community of people who saw the need. Computers at that time were much like massively parallel supercomputers today in that only the well heeled could afford them and only the most difficult problems could justify their use, but there was no shortage of such people or such problems.
Of course, none of this is meant to minimize the importance of the transistor machines in spreading the use of computers to a much larger community and to new classes of problems.
As for video displays on computers, they didn't really exist until the early 60s, and it would be a lot longer before they became the norm. When you say "that is kind of a hindrance for speedy work", you're thinking of interactive computing, which wasn't even imagined until the 60s and didn't really become dominant until the 70s. Before then, batch computing was the norm. And that's fine if your computing involves submitting a big job which does lots of computation and produces a small amount of output, maybe a table of numbers. Many scientific and engineering jobs (and even a lot of business jobs) fell into that sphere--a printer was fine for them.
In fact the very idea of interactive computing was considered to be a horrible waste of computing power when it was first proposed in the early 60s. Computers and computing time were so expensive back then that you wanted the machine to be as fully utilized as possible, and it was hard to see how interactive computing would be anything other than wasteful, since the computer would be waiting for the user most of the time. Of course, time-shared operating systems eliminated some of that concern, and the falling cost of computing power did the rest.
Even once interactive computing was accepted, printers were still used for a long time as printing terminals. Editing with a printing terminal is harder than on a video display, but it can be done with the right approach. All the earliest text editors and command languages were developed with printing terminals in mind, and they were used for decades before video displays finally took over.
(By the way, ENIAC did have a primitive digital display on each of its registers. The registers were decimal, and the value of each digit was displayed on a column of 10 lights above the circuits for that digit. This is more like a "blinkenlights" display than a modern digital display, but it was still useful.)
For details about the ENIAC's history (which was much longer and more useful than you might guess), you might want to check out http://ftp.arl.mil/~mike/comphist/. It's got lots of good information.
I'm sorry, I should have had a better choice of words. I don't think they were worthless, just not as usefull. Vacuum tube computers did a lot of important work.
If you don't understand any of my sayings, come to me in private and I shall take you in my German mouth.
I'd mod you up if I had my points. Very interesting read.
Please, make sure your fathers documents don't become a 'lost' bit of technical history. Get them safely enshrined, or at least the content on the net.
Readers of Andrew Hodges' definitive biography "Alan Turing:The Enigma" are very familiar with Eckert and Mauchly and Atanasoff. That book has detailed account of the inventions and the patent disputes.
;)
:)
I read the book right in the summer after my EE graduation and it made me want to switch to CS
Also, good computer architecture books usually mention Eckert and Mauchly somewhere in Chapter 1
that Animal Chin invented the skateboard.
Have you seen him?
This one doesn't appear in a lot of older comp sci books, because the UK kept it secret for a long (very long) time. But it predates ENIAC. Now we're back to definitions of "computer". Make it wide enough, and Bababage wins (by a healthy margin)
BugBear
Ignorance is curable. Stupid is forever.
Tommy Flowers.
There seems to be a strong element of national pride that goes into ideas about who invented the computer, and where. It's a bit like Cold War-era disagreement between the US and the USSR about who invented airplanes.
I grew up in the US, where everybody swears up and down that the ENIAC was the first computer.
I've lived for a long time in Germany, where everybody swears up and down that computers were invented by Konrad Zuse.
And I've met Brits who swear up and down that the first computers were built in Manchester (maybe one of you wants to fill in the story here, eh mates?).
The common element in all this is that most people have only ever heard the heroic story about their own nation; and when confronted with one of the other legends, they conclude that the other guys are jingoistic, Orwellian distorters of history, and completely out of their minds.
Always keep a sapphire in your mind
Calculation was electronic. There wee indeed spinning cylinders--with capacitors. On display in Atanasoff (two F's!) Hall are a tube module and a memory drum. I want to say that one's original, while the other is a replica.
The machine was binary, another first.
Anyway, you can find all you wnated to know and then some at
http://www.cs.iastate.edu/jva/jva-archive.shtml
Quite often the losing lawyers and clients believe the case was wrongly decided (not that *I* ever had that happen
I do mean "taken from"--they came to the campus, met with the folks who were left, read what schematics existed (there were never schematics for the whole thing), and built the ENIAC.
Finally, there are now two replicas of the ABC that were built a few years ago: one permanently at the Smithsonian, and the other on tour. One of them was actually fired up to run a program. You can find replica information on that page as well. Among the things to find is that they relied on photographs that happened to exist to figute out the wiring and circuits, and old university purchasing records--and found thatthey were still able to order some of the same exotic parts from the same places.
Why a replica? It seems the thing was cannibalized for parts for other projects after it served its purpose.
hawk
John W. Mauchly and the Development of the ENIAC Computer from the Penn Library.
I thought that surfers in california invented the skateboard for those flat days.
"hehe, website" - Homer Simpson
The problem wasn't military failure, but that what we set out to do was just plain dumb: hold this imaginary line, chase them back across when they come across, but don't go over it to end thing (that might annoy them).
It's beyond me what could *possibly* be achieved in such a manner--the long-term cease fire of Korea seems to be the absolute best case outcome.
The real tragedy of vietnam is that by any rational military measure it was a success
World Cup? Why worry about that when we have the Superbowl every year
hawk
Another difference, the Americans formed a real country, the United States of America.
The french did not form a real country, they only only formed france, with great help from Benjamin Franklin, of Philideplhia, PA.
I was about to point out that we are a republic, not a democracy too.
Also, quit talking about kanadia like it is a real country. It is about as much a country as france is.
:)
hawk
In case you were asleep and only eat American propaganda, you might have missed the real first programmable computer: Colussus, built by Dr. Flowers for the Post Office. 10 were built and installed in Bletchley Park from 1944 until the end of the war. 8 were dismantled, and the 2 remaining were used by British code breakers until 1960. It was reassembled in 1996. This wasn't just the first computer, it was a fast computer. It was designed to be parallel, and could process a peak of 9600 cps. It was able to decode messages based on the "fish" algorithm developed by the Nazi High Command for secure messages.
Just get your facts right. Colossus was the first computer ever built - whether or not it was classified and hidden in shadows.
There have been planks with wheels under them forever but that does not yet constitute for a skateboard. Skateboard is (or at least when invented it was) a plank with a roller skate nailed underneath it. The claim for the invention presented ihere is only a sign of the times: skateboarding has again gained popularity and now everyone wants to jump the bandwagon.
Antti S. Brax - Old school - http://www.iki.fi/asb/
The analysis of the constitution is spot on
and the pecularities of American "democracy"
are another bullseye.
The famous (and rather conservative) political
scientist Samuel Huntington long ago suggested
the American system of government recapitulated
the political equilibrium of the pre-English Civil War England (ie 1640's). IE, our vaunted separation of powers reproduces the complex and somewhat dysfunctional standoff between the monarchy/court, the country gentry and parliament.
Huntington's thesis was that the colonies were politically allied with the "country" faction of English politics and hence reproduced and idealized form of how these reactionary nobles wanted government to work. Not a democracy really as much as an oligopoly composed of a weak monarchy and a strong, dispered, nobility.
So much for the Constituion being a revolutionary document, and it ain't terribly democratic neither.
Anyway, my vote is for the computer.
It is by coff... er, will, alone I set my mind in motion...
I believe computers and hence computer science has fundamentally changed the way we think about things.
I concur. Though I think this comment in general can apply to any material display of ingenuity. Any tool we create, we do so to expand our capability, sometimes far more than we imagine. The incremented capability then allows us to consider more complex problems and unveils new areas of inquiry. The computer is not alone in that.
The cylinder and piston is not the point - the science it inspired is.
Whereas I appreciate the sentiment, to some extent you equally miss the point. The science is important, but science without an implementation has never fed the hungry, put a roof over anyone's head, nor has it given man more capability. That is dependent on the implementation which in this case is the computer.
The computer IS just a glorified adding machine, and it only does things we could (in a longer time and with great pains) do ourselves without it. However, as a glorified adding machine, it lets us attack larger problems (and more complex ones) faster, thus opening new questions to consideration and allowing us to attack problems formerly beyond attack due to their raw size and the mortality of man. The computer is a tool, and only a tool. But tools *are* significant, as they are the multipliers that we affix to the human intelligence and capability we bear.
-- Mal: "Well they tell you: never hit a man with a closed fist. But it is, on occasion, hilarious."
I only said grammatical error, not spelling error.
Any half wit Anonymous Coward can claim itself as a biochemist. You could be just a narcotic traffiker for all I know. If you are what you claim you are, PROVE IT!!! Besides, you haven't even shown any medical knowledge to properly train and diagnose patients, especially over the net, behind firewalls, and knows nothing about the users beside their messages. Your pathetic 'diagnostic' makes quacks look professional by comparision.