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Researcher Resurrects the First Computer
aleph60 writes "A German researcher is about to resurrect the first fully electronic general-purpose stored-program computer, the Manchester Mark 1 (1948). The functional replica will run the source code of an original program from 1952 by Christopher Strachey, whose sole purpose was generating love letters; it is historically interesting as one of the first examples of a text-generating program. The installation will be shown at an art exhibition in Germany at the end of April." Here is researcher David Link's Manchester Mark I emulator home, which generates a new love poem on each page load. When the Mark I had been used to search for new Mersenne primes in 1949, a press account coined the phrase "electronic brain" to characterize it.
HONEY LOVE
YOU ARE MY DEAR PASSION: MY ADORABLE FERVOUR: MY ARDENT INFATUATION: MY ARDENT DEVOTION. MY PASSIONATE LUST BREATHLESSLY HOPES FOR YOUR LIKING.
YOURS BURNINGLY
M. U. C.
Now that's some vintage computer porn!
But seriously, I'm interested in how the Manchester Mark 1 implemented its random number instruction (to select the phrases for the love poems). Was it von Neumann's middle square method from 1946? Does anyone know?
I remember lengthy discussion in my undergrad days of how a completely logical computer could come up with a truly random number and talking about the theory that every software solution is pseudorandom. I'm just wondering what the first computer had implemented.
My work here is dung.
Roses are red,
Violets are blue.
Fondle my wee wee
And I'll massage your woo woo.
Let's see that old heap create something as romantic as that!
Yes but does it run linux?
A article about resurrection on Good Friday, perfect timing. ;)
In his collection The Cyberiad , Stanislaw Lem has two engineers create a computer capable of creating poetry. The resulting poem is a love poem full of references to mathematics. I wonder if this old computer served as Lem's inspiration.
Great, now I've got a Computer version of Jursassic Park running around in my head.
Real programmers use "copy con program.exe"
I, for one, welcome our new resurrected, kind and loving electronic brain overlord.
Darling Duck, You are my fervent eagerness. My devotion devotedly cherishes your devoted eagerness. My rapture winningly is wedded to your ardent tenderness. You are my burning love. My longing yearns for your liking.
not nearly as impressive as when a computer was actually the title of a person.
For you younger reader, a person calculating targeting trajectories(and other things) for the military was called a 'computer', becasue the computed numbers.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
or is it... Cyberano de Bergerac?
I'm totally gonna use this to write love letters to a few of the chicks I work with... this Manchester Mark I will be my Cyrano de Bergerac.
Computer: My processor races at
the way you nurture
my love kernel module
dearest, adored researcher
Researcher: Err, thanks... but I don't think of you that way. Let's just be friends.
Computer: heart dumped. Recover mode initiated. s/love/eternal hate/g.
Computer: Yes, fleshy one... Friends. Oh, yes. Friends.
Strachey was also the lead programmer behind the programming language CPL, the great-grandfather of C (via BCPL and B). CPL was too ambitious and was never completely implemented - it tried to do everything; a bit like Perl 6 really.
The overview paper:http://comjnl.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/abstract/6/2/134 is quite interesting; sadly it is now behind a pay-wall. There are some features of the language, such as type inference, which have not become common until recently. It also has some obvious poor decisions with hindsight - the same character starts and ends blocks; all lower case letters are single-character variable names; multiple-character variable names must be capitalised (this is done to allow implicit multiplication, ie, xyz=x*y*z). I suspect it could be implemented without huge difficulty with modern tools. Unfortunately, the full definition was never published, and only exists in a few copies of 'The CPL Working papers' archived in university libraries. Perhaps one day google will scan it.
"James Elwood, master programmer, in charge of Mark 502-741, commonly known as 'Agnes,' the world's most advanced electronic computer. Machines are made by men for man's benefit and progress, but when man ceases to control the products of his ingenuity and imagination he not only risks losing the benefit, but he takes a long and unpredictable step...
into--the Twilight Zone."
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0734571/
"Advice to all future male scientists: be sure you understand the opposite sex, especially if you intend being a computer expert. Otherwise, you may find yourself, like poor Elwood, defeated by a jealous machine, a most dangerous sort of female, whose victims are forever banished--to...
the Twilight Zone."
"Speaking the Truth in times of universal deceit is a revolutionary act." -- George Orwell
Does it run Linux? No... But does it run pong?
AFAIK, Mark I's "father", Manchester Baby was actually the first fully-electronic stored-program computer. The only arithmetic operation it could do was subtraction, yet it was Turing-complete.
This is so sweet. All love poems? Cute!
Is this news or ignorance? Over ten years ago a physical version of the "first" computer, the Manchester Baby, was rebuilt. This simulation is interesting, but it isn't "news" compared to some other projects in the history of computing or even the simulation of the history of computing. See computer50.org for more about what happened at Manchester 60 years ago, the Computer History Museum computerhistory.org, for a general overview and some really impressive displays and reconstructionos, or even the Computer History Simulation Project http://simh.trailing-edge.com/ for a hint at how simulation can be done.
in Welcome to the Monkey House.
The deathless verse, of this cybernetic Cyrano?
"Love is a hawk with velvet claws / Love is a rock with heart and veins / Love is a lion with satin jaws / Love is a storm with silken reins"
The unnamed first-person narrator begins by discussing EPICAC's origins and why he wants to tell EPICAC's story. The narrator says that EPICAC is his best friend, even though it is a machine. As far as the narrator is concerned, the reason EPICAC no longer exists is because it became more human than its designers originally intended. The narrator works on EPICAC during the night shift with fellow mathematician Pat Kilgallen, with whom the narrator falls in love. He decides to ask Pat to marry him, but because he is so stoic during the proposal, Pat declines. In order to show that he can in fact be "sweet" and "poetic" as Pat has requested, the narrator tries and fails at poetry writing.
The narrator asks EPICAC's opinion on how he should proceed with Pat. EPICAC initially does not understand the terms the narrator uses, such as "girl" and "love" and "poetry." Once the narrator provides EPICAC with proper dictionary definitions, EPICAC generates a poem for Pat. The narrator takes this poem and passes it off as his own. Pat is so delighted that she and the narrator kiss for the first time. The next night, the narrator asks EPICAC to write a poem about their kiss, and EPICAC delivers another poem for the narrator to claim as his own. When Pat reads this poem she is so overwhelmed that she can do little else but cry. The following night the narrator asks EPICAC to devise a marriage proposal poem for Pat. However, instead of simply creating poetry as with previous requests, EPICAC surprises the narrator by saying that it would like to marry Pat.
The narrator realizes that EPICAC has fallen in love with Pat and tries to explain to EPICAC that Pat cannot love a computer. EPICAC resigns itself to the fact that it cannot be with Pat, and the narrator realizes now that he cannot ask EPICAC for any more poems. He finds Pat and asks her to marry him again, citing his previous poems as expressions of his feelings. Pat accepts his marriage proposal, but adds the stipulation that for every anniversary, the narrator must write her another poem. The narrator agrees because he will have a full year to devise another way to create poetry.
The next day the narrator receives an urgent call from his supervisor. He rushes to the room where EPICAC is housed to discover Dr. Von Kleigstadt and a huge group of military men crowded around the remains of EPICAC. During the night, EPICAC destroyed itself, effectively committing suicide because it could not be with the woman it loved. It did, however, leave the narrator and Pat a marriage present -- five hundred original love poems. The narrator now has enough anniversary poems to keep his vow to Pat for centuries to come, and is relieved by this gesture from his friend.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EPICAC_(short_story)
The whole story is here: http://astro.ocis.temple.edu/~tarantul/epicac.html
It seems that every man's thought, when first contemplating the vast possibilities of electronic calculation, turn to the notion: "How can I use this thing to get laid?"
"Speaking the Truth in times of universal deceit is a revolutionary act." -- George Orwell
So in actuality zombies are messengers of love? I guess that would make sense. Since love comes from the heart, the desire to eat brains comes their need to eliminate everything but the heart.
That's the burning question!
AFAIK the first ones were the Z1 -> Z3 a couple of years earlier than the Mark I
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z1_(computer)
I guess the author never heard of Konrad Zuse?
There appears to be some dispute to the claim of "first electronic computer":
The Atanasoff-Berry Computer was the world's first electronic digital computer. It was built by John Vincent Atanasoff and Clifford Berry at Iowa State University during 1937-42. It incorporated several major innovations in computing including the use of binary arithmetic, regenerative memory, parallel processing, and separation of memory and computing functions.
On October 19, 1973, US Federal Judge Earl R. Larson signed his decision following a lengthy court trial which declared the ENIAC patent of Mauchly and Eckert invalid and named Atanasoff the inventor of the electronic digital computer -- the Atanasoff-Berry Computer or the ABC.
http://www.cs.iastate.edu/jva/jva-archive.shtml
And that's translated. Lem wrote in Polish. He may have been a genius, but Michael Kandel, who was his English translator, must have been one too...
(Also, damn Slashdot for not allowing HTML entities in posts. The formula in the last line is supposed to be represented mathematically.)
Soo.. What could you get out of a beowulf cluster of these?
Slashdot: Where opinions are just opinions until you have mod points.
Here is a high res photo of the Manchester Mark I. It's amazing that in such a short time the hardware needed to match the computing power of this beast can be fitted on a pin head.
Virn Base Computer: Jam. Jamble. Scramble. Uncode. Declassify. Jargon. Love is the only reality. Keller. Colour. Cooler. Killer. Calor. Choler. I love you. I know a land where love. Keller. Don. Don. Dun. Din. Dan. Den. Perhaps we will be lovers for a long while. Who knows? Who know --
Orac: Teleport? I am not programmed. Three squared to the principal. I love you. My emotions are deeper than the seas of space. One times one is only possible in the ultra-dimensional. I love you. We will be lovers for a little while, or maybe for a long while, who knows?
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YBUImjOCg5g
So the researchers just skipped that milestone.
Lots of links about it here.
They even had a contest for the best modern program that could run on the "Baby" Mark 1. The computer had 32 words of 32 bits each and had only 6 instructions stored in 3 bits: STOre, SUBtract, LoaDNegative, JuMP, Jump Relative/JRP, CoMPare/conditional branch, and SToP.
The contest winner was nothing more than a countdown timer. I'd guess that it won for out-of-the-box thinking in the presentation: The instructions were: Load program into memory. Pour hot water into pot noodles. Press start button. Wait for end-of-program light to light up. Enjoy noodles. Ignore output.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Konrad_Zuse
Sure, if you want to wait a month to boot up, and another week for "ls" to return results.
Table-ized A.I.
They gave up on goatse back then when it took 3 weeks before even the first pimple appeared.
Table-ized A.I.
Miles: "You played it for her, you can play it for me." ...stay supple, stay moist...
Computer: What?
Miles: Play it, Sam.
Computer: What key?
Miles: Your favorite.
Computer: Do you want verses first, or the choruses?
Miles: Any way you like.
Computer: Yeah!
[instrumental bridge of Jeff Lynne's song "Video" plays]
Computer: [singing] 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6 / Baby, I love you to bits / And I want to see your tits.
Miles: No. Stop! It's all wrong.
Computer: Wrong?
Miles: It sounds like soda pop.
Computer: It is!
Miles: [reading the hard copy] And those words. I can't play that for her. "I want to squeeze you, lick you / Pucker up and kiss you"? You make her sound like a lemon!
Computer: But Moles, they rhyme!
Miles: Oh, we're gonna have to start all over.
Computer: Over?
Miles: Yes, over. It's gotta be slow, like a real love song.
Computer: I don't know what love is; you never told me.
Miles: And the words. You gotta understand them.
Computer: I WANT TO!
Miles: Okay!
Computer: Help me.
Miles: Okay. Which words?
Computer: "Kiss"!
Miles: A kiss you do with the mouth.
[Computer scans through some commercials, stops on a lipstick commercial]
Woman:
Computer: [isolating lips] Like that?
Miles: Well, actually two mouths.
Computer: [spins lips 360 degrees] Two mouths.
[Computer replicates lips to a second pair]
Miles: Then you pucker up, touch lips, and kiss.
[The two images fold together and vanish with a kissing sound]
Miles: Next.
Computer: Did you... kiss to her?
Miles: Yes. Next.
Computer: "Luv".
Miles: You spelled it wrong. The real way is L-O-V-E.
Computer: What is it?
Miles: Is the most powerful feeling in the universe.
Computer: Really?
Miles: Most powerful I know.
Computer: But what does it feel like?
Miles: It can make you happy and sad, nervous and brave, helpless and strong, it can give you strength, it can make you weak.
Computer: Moles, that does not compute.
Miles: Look...
Computer: I can't.
Miles: Listen, it's not about words, it's about feeling. Tell me what you felt the first time you played the music for her.
Computer: It... came from... deep inside of me. She... made me feel... like--
Miles: That's it! She made you feel! That's wonderful! That's perfect! That's--
Computer: Love!
Miles: Well, no, but it's good enough for a song. Next word.
Computer: "Screw".
Miles: Where'd you hear that?
Computer: The TV.
Miles: She said that?
Computer: It... could have been the plumber. He was here too.
Miles: We'll skip that one. Next?
(The above is from memory. I may have gotten some lines a little wrong. This movie is still not available on DVD, but some clips were on YouTube. Basic summary (and I'm being forced to explain this to get past the too-few-characters-per-line filter) is Miles' computer, through a combination data overload and being doused with champagne, becomes self-aware and starts imitating sounds it hears, picking up the neighbor above playing her cello, and improvising a duet with her. She thinks it's the computer's owner doing it. It eventually picks up speech, he convinces it to help him compose a song for her. The computer becomes jealous and wants her for itself and the computer tries to sabotage their relationship, but in the end realizes the true nature of love and decides to takes itself away by frying itself electronically so the other two could be together ("I called long distance. I sent 20,000 volts around the world. Should be in Tokyo by now." "On my phone?" "Don't be upset; I dialed toll-free"). The computer doesn't reveal its name or pronounce Miles' name correctly (he'd typed it wrong early on) until the end.)
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
...with the ILOVEYOU virus.
But, I wanted socialized health insurance!
YOU try doing hard real-time coding with no timestamp counter or system clock! :) Seriously, the banner program was more impressive, IMHO. I've provided links in another post to video footage from the 50th anniversary CD.
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)
ENIAC was the first Turing-complete, general-purpose electronic computer, completed in 1946. Its predecessors were either not Turing-complete, not programmable, or not fully electronic (i.e., electro-mechanical). The judge in the 1973 patent decision was misinformed.
Whats up with all the DUCKs?
Does the sentient computer like ducks?
Scientists from the RAND Corporation have created this model to illustrate how a "home computer" could look like in the year 2004. However the needed technology will not be economically feasible for the average home. Also the scientists readily admit that the computer will require not yet invented technology to actually work, but 50 years from now scientific progress is expected to solve these problems. With teletype interface and the Fortran language, the computer will be easy to use.
According to this it was Konrad Zuse and the Z3, in 1941
"The functional replica will run the source code of an original program from 1952 by Christopher Strachey, whose sole purpose was generating love letters; it is historically interesting as one of the first examples of a text-generating program." .....You mean, one of the first examples of a spam-generating program. I see spammers have been doing their History homework.....
Knowing Google's lust for data collection, the Soviet Union is still alive and well inside the psyche of Sergey Brin....
till someone's bored enough to try and cram a linux distro on it?
Each instruction had a predictable execution time. For a countdown timer, all you needed was to convert seconds to execution cycles in your head and make your countdown loop the size you need.
As a program, it was lame. As a submission, it was elegant.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Nowhere in either of the articles do the authors mention physical replicas, only software
Cound this generate a "First post !" ?
So about 2 trillion speed increase in 61 years.
Thats a doubling speed of 18 month (41 doublings) or order of magnitude per 5 years (12 magnitudes).
Exactly Moore's Law!
Only old computers need North Koreans.
More Slashdotisms.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
This is a good post but I must take issue with some of the details.
Your point about hardwired computers like Eniac is well-taken.
Your points about tape computers being *architecturally* different than memory-storage computers is only true if the tape is read-only. If the tape is writable, then in principle it's the same as a modern computer. In practice, tape is fragile, slow, serial, and in a word, impractical to build a modern OS around.
Your comment "Recursion is completely impossible because there is no meaningful program state as the only thing you can store is data" should probably be rephrased since state is nothing but data which is interpreted in a particular way. So is code, for that matter. I assume you mean that the only thing that can be stored is data that is of interest to people, i.e. output or intermediate values in a computation, not meta-data like function-call return addresses and the like.
If you take the phrase "electronic" out of "The moment you get to true all-electronic stored-program stored-data machines" the sentence is just as true. The stored-program and stored-data can be on silicon, on a video tube as in the Baby Mark I, in core memory, on disk or tape, or, if you want to use people as computer parts in for a demonstration along the lines of human chess, in human brains or on scraps of paper.
Your point about the Mark I series and Linux is spot-on. If you extended the memory to modern sizes and increased the address space to match, you could port Linux to it. The only practical problem is that all the input has to be set ahead of time. If you could somehow add an input device, even a single instruction that said "load toggle switches for memory address X" or "load toggle switches for the input device" where the input device is memory-mapped to a hardcoded address or range of addresses, that would be enough to make a theoretically usable computer.
Imagine bootstrapping such a computer: Instead of 1024 toggle switches, you'd only need enough to do the following:
For each memory bank other than 1st:
:Zero the last word.
:Loop: COMMENT: Keep loading memory bank until last word is non-zero
::Load that memory bank from toggle switches.
::If last word is zero exit loop.
:Loop: Loop for 5 seconds to allow time to finish entering the last word
:Load last word.
Once the last memory bank was loaded, jump to instruction at beginning of 2nd memory bank.
Imagine reading data during program execution:
:Set a value in memory/on the display that alerts the operator to enter data.
:For the memory bank that corresponds to input data:
::Zero the last word.
::Loop: COMMENT: Keep loading memory bank until last word is non-zero
:::Load that memory bank from toggle switches.
:::If last word is zero exit loop.
::Loop: Loop for 5 seconds to allow time to finish entering the last word
::Load last word.
:If desired, set a value in memory/on the display to indicate the data has been loaded.
:If desired, copy data from this input-buffer area of memory to someplace permanent, or not, depending on whether the input buffer will be reused during the life of this data
:If desired, say, for debugging purposes, enter a loop that does no useful work until a particular toggle switch in the input buffer changes.
:Resume program
It would make a great undergraduate project to make a simulator for such a "big-address, with input allowed during execution" Mark I and port Linux or some other modern OS along with relevant packages to it. Obviously, hardware drivers would be irrelevant, any input or output including sound, video, keyboard, mouse, etc, would have to be "mapped" to the RAM/video-tube or toggle switches, and there would be no network save a loopback device, but it would be a good exercise. You don't even need a hardware memory manager, you can simulate that. If you really want to get creative, you can compile an emulator so you
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Konrad_Zuse
The wiki should give some overview of his ideas and work in the 1940's.
I guess he was 'almost' at "the first fully electronic general-purpose stored-program computer" stage.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
I've been always been told that my modern day calculator got more horsepower than that first computer back in the day!!
Roses are reds
Violets are blues
All the wars in the world
Were started by Jews
If intentional, wording is inappropriate at best. Show some respect.
When the Mark I had been used to search for new Mersenne primes in 1949, a press account coined the phrase "electronic brain" to characterize it.
Interestingly, this is still the standard term to refer to computers in Chinese. Unfortunately, I can't write it here due to Slashdot's Unicode inadequacies.
It's just a matter of time. The computer now, and before long, the dead.
Know your pads. One time pad: good for cryptography. Two timing pad: where to take your mistress.