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'Modern' Computers Turn 60 Years Old

Posted by CowboyNeal on from the happy-birthday-baby dept.

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."

6 of 88 comments (clear)

  1. No, it doesn't run Linux.... by advocate_one · · Score: 4, Funny

    not a hope of backporting to this one...

    --
    Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
    1. Re:No, it doesn't run Linux.... by oodaloop · · Score: 3, Funny

      Yeah, but imagine a beowulf cluster of those. The real estate alone would be staggering.

      --
      Tic-Tac-Toe, Global Thermonuclear War, and relationships all have the same winning move.
  2. Way to go by Iwanowitch · · Score: 5, Funny

    "If you give it a prime number to try then the highest factor of that is one," said Mr Burton.
    First program EVER and it already had a bug in it.
    --
    One CS student VS 893 DOS games: Let's play oldies
  3. Re:Evolution by cayenne8 · · Score: 4, Funny
    "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."

    Yeah...but, those old tubes used to make the data 'feel' warmer.

    :-)

    --
    Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
  4. Re:and year . . . by hawk · · Score: 3, Funny

    The schools these days . . .

    let's try it this way:

    Mommy hippo weighs 1200 pounds.

    Daddy hippo weighs a time and a half as much as Mommy.

    How much does Mommy hippo weigh? :)

  5. Re:Evolution by kestasjk · · Score: 3, Funny

    1. Transistors get far smaller

    2. ???

    3. We are slaves to robotic overlords

    Maybe if you use Will Smith's humor, or a recursive time-travel paradox, to distract us from the "???" it could work as a plot.

    --
    // MD_Update(&m,buf,j);