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'Modern' Computers Turn 60 Years Old
Christian Smith writes "Stored program computers are 60 years old on Saturday. The Small Scale Experimental Machine, or 'Baby,' first ran on the 21st of June, 1948, in Manchester. While not the first computer, nor even programmable computer, it was the first that stored its program in its own memory. Luckily, transistors shrank the one tonne required for this computing power to something more manageable."
What's that in Volkswagen Beetles?
Women are like electronics: you don't know how damaged they are until you try to turn them on.
In 60 years we've gone from computers the size of a room to a laptop computers thin enough to fit in an interoffice envelope. Where will we be in another 60 years, or even ten for that matter? It's somewhat scary that we've created a technology that advances much quicker than ourselves. It's just a matter of time before we are the number two species ( if you can call a computer a species ) walking the planet.
That's as many as six tens.
And that's terrible.
Those things you're doing with that stuff you just bought? That's not what it's for! -
US or European? Saftey equipment varies and so do curb weights.
Invenio via vel creo
If only they'd had log4baby they could've tried factoring more interesting numbers.
not a hope of backporting to this one...
Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
Not to nitpick but...What about the machines built by Zuse?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Konrad_Zuse
One CS student VS 893 DOS games: Let's play oldies
I'd sing the Happy Birthday song but, well, they prolly first used it to lookup tubgirl.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
If memory serves, my father's '64 beetle weighed 1200 lbs, while my '74 superbeetle was a time and a half that . . .
hawk
They had a programming contest 10 years ago. A pot-noodle timer won and was loaded on the rebuilt machine in a big celebration.
Read more:
Manchester Celebrates the 50th Anniversary of the First Stored-Program Computer
The 1998 Programming Competition
Simulators so you can try your hand at programming a 60-year-old computer.
We invented the computer!!!
ENIAC was the first proper computer. Everyone knows the computer is an American invention, like planes and automobiles and electricity (telephone, radio and electric motors). If it wasn't for America, no one would be able to go faster than a horse's speed, or send messages thousands of miles. We'd all be stuck in the dark ages!
I thought the definition of a "modern" computer included being able to display pr0n.
It used 24 bit address space, expandable to 32, so although it only physically posessed 32 words of memory, it could easily have supported a modern operating system if the memory had been built for it. And you didn't mind the response times.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
No we are not you insensitive clod!
We invented the computer!!!
ENIAC was the first proper computer. Everyone knows the computer is an American invention, like planes and automobiles and electricity (telephone, radio and electric motors). If it wasn't for America, no one would be able to go faster than a horse's speed, or send messages thousands of miles. We'd all be stuck in the dark ages!
Troll. Probably Canadian or Brit.In Communist days, the doctrine coming out of the Kremlin ( seems familiar somehow) was that Those Imperialist dogs in the west invented nothing.
- TV
- Telephone
- Radio
- Internal Combustion Engine
- etc
were all invented by Russian Patriots.
Back to reality.
Those of you in the USA should just learn to accept some basic facts.
Most things ( apart from the likes of Edison) pre WWII were invented either somewhere else or by an immigrant to the USA.
Who had the worlds first TV service? Certainly not the USA. I have seen some text books in the USA where this was not mentioned.
That is by-the-bye.
Not 5 miles from me is a roundabout that has on it, a large scale replica of the Gloucester Meteor ( Farnborough, UK). It really irks me that Sir Frank Whittle does not get the credit he deserves in the rest of the world for the creation of the first viable jet engine which Britain had to virtually give away during WW2 to the USA.
But hey, thats life isn't it?
More seriously :
In 60 years we've gone from computers the size of a room to a laptop computers thin enough to fit in an interoffice envelope. Where will we be in another 60 years, or even ten for that matter? You can bet that the developer will definitely find use for additional power, as machine performance increases.What has caused the computers to shrink to envelop-size isn't as much the increased performance/size ratio. It's the market.
If Moore's law stated (roughly paraphrasing) that computer performance doubles each 2 years, one should expect the computer to reduce their size by half in that time frame. But that didn't happen. Because most of the time people only one to use the additional performance to have the same box as before but faster.
Only from time to time the users' interest shifts.
Desktop replaced microcomputers and mainframes, not (only) because suddenly the circuits could have been made smaller, but mainly because there was an increased interest in having a computer in each house.
Today's UMPC appeared only because the public is starting to have interest into something that is small and cheap. With the increase of circuit density, building pocketable devices that have the same power as computers from a couple of years before has been possible for quite long time. PDA have been around for a few years and some have quite decent performance. But the demand only started arising now.
So what will happen in 10 years ?
It all depends on the market then.
The technology will be around that could fit the processing power of today's big cluster into a chip as small as a pen.
But then it all depends of buyers choice. If suddenly pen--sized computer are the latest trends, you'll see them around. Probably with geeks claiming that 2018 will finaly be year of the Linux PenComputer, because Windows 8.0 just can't run on them.
But if UMPC are still the trend, you'll only see the same form factor as before, only with 40x processing power than today - three quarter of which will be taken by a combination of the bloated operating system and the DRM lock mechanisms.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Actually, it's been proven that you can get by with only a single instruction, a subtract and branch with three operand addresses. However, having three memory references isn't really classic RISC, which tends to also reduce the number of cycles it takes to execute, and rarely includes read-modify-write instructions.
It strikes me that the "modern computer" has an annivessary every year - only they change the definition and the computer in question every year too...
I'm surprised no one mentioned yet that this was the same computer that produced the oldest recorded computer music (found so far).
The only surefire protection against Microsoft infections is abstinence. - The Onion
You could at least try to read the article first. If you had, you'd realise how silly you look right now.
This is truly insensitive.
Please phrase weights in "stone," or "oxenweight."
Thanks!
timothy
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
It has something that modern computers don't have: Direct RAM inspection. I'm jealous. If I had that, I might be able to get that damned codec to work.
Table-ized A.I.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I've programmed a direct descendant of this machine (in assembler) : the Ferranti FM1600B. 24 bit words 192KB memory running at about the speed of a calculator. And its water cooled!
When I first started you'd put some instructions in by hand (on a set of 24 switches) to load the bootloader from papertape and then the bootloader would load the program from magtape. All very 1960s tech but this was the late 80s.
These machines are still in service (although they don't use handswitches and papertapes anymore - yay progress) because they work and they virtually never crash.
> the first commercial general purpose computer, the Ferranti Mark I.
I thought the first commercial general-purpose computer was the Leo.