Slashdot Mirror
'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.
US or European? Saftey equipment varies and so do curb weights.
Invenio via vel creo
not a hope of backporting to this one...
Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
Zuse's machine didn't have memory, which is part of how they're defining "modern computer."
If you haven't been down-modded lately, you aren't trying.
Sacred cows make the best hamburger.
Well, according to wilkipedia it had memory
"Improving on the basic Z2 machine, he built the Z3 in 1941. It was a binary 64-bit floating point calculator featuring programmability with loops but without conditional jumps, with memory and a calculation unit based on telephone relays. The telephone relays used in his machines were largely collected from discarded stock."
More specifically, it didn't store software in memory.
One CS student VS 893 DOS games: Let's play oldies
The Z3 has a register (the "memory" cited in Wikipedia), but does not have memory for storing a program. (They're using the Von Neuman criteria for defining a computer.)
If you haven't been down-modded lately, you aren't trying.
Sacred cows make the best hamburger.
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.
The Baby is set apart from other early machines by two major features.
Memory was what we would call dynamic RAM. The storage element was special CRT's called Williams tubes which were the first all-electronic memory device (flip-flops we not economically viable for storing data). Williams tubes were randomly accessible and, used charges to store bits, and were therefore volatile. The volatile characteristic means that bits had to be refreshed by reading, or they would evaporate due to charge leakage. This is the same reason modern RAM chips have a periodic refresh cycle. This isn't a functional parallel, just a historically interesting one. FWIW, mercury delay lines are volatile, too, but not because of charge leakage. Programs were read into RAM from which they were executed.
The other feature of the Baby which was adopted into subsequent designs was conditional jumps - sort of like goto's. The relative jump is a jump to a calculated address. Without the ability to hop around the program space based on whether statements are evaluated as true or false precludes easy implementation of things like for loops and arrays. In 1998, the Z3 was mathematically proved to be capable of conditional jumps, but this was not an intent in its design and didn't lead anywhere.
The Baby had only seven instructions (take that, Microchip PIC!):
Jump (indirect), Jump Relative (indirect), Load Negative, Store Accumulator, Subtract, Skip if Accumulator < 0, Halt
A very good and hard to find page with info on the Mark I <URL:www4.wittenberg.edu/academics/mathcomp/bjsdir/madmmk1.shtml/>
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? :)
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)
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 ]