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.

Comments

Random Numbers on the Manchester Mark 1?

[eldavojohn]

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.

A poem, for vous

[BadAnalogyGuy]

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!

Re:A poem, for vous

[geekoid]

Roses are red,
Violates are Orange,
Some poems rhyme,
Not this one.

Re:A poem, for vous

[Anonymous Coward]

Lenin is red
Tsarists are blue
In Soviet Russia
Poem write you!

Haha, perfect timing

[Jeian]

A article about resurrection on Good Friday, perfect timing. ;)

Re:Haha, perfect timing

[MoToMo]

It would have been better on Valentine's day, when it could have saved me $5 at Hallmark.

The cause for the coming Robot War revealed!

[cptnapalm]

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.

Love and Tensor Algebra

[david.given]

Klapaucius thought, and thought some more. Finally he nodded and said:

"Very well. Let's have a love poem, lyrical, pastoral, and expressed in the language of pure mathematics. Tensor algebra mainly, with a little topology and higher calculus, if need be. But with feeling, you understand, and in the cybernetic spirit."

"Love and tensor algebra? Have you taken leave of your senses?" Trurl began, but stopped, for his electronic bard was already declaiming:

Come, let us hasten to a higher plane,
Where dyads tread the fairy fields of Venn,
Their indices bedecked from one to n,
Commingled in an endless Markov chain!

Come, every frustum longs to be a cone,
And every vector dreams of matrices.
Hark to the gentle gradient of the breeze:
It whispers of a more ergodic zone.

In Riemann, Hilbert, or in Banach space
Let superscripts and subscripts go their ways.
Our asymptotes no longer out of phase,
We shall encounter, counting, face to face.

I'll grant thee random access to my heart,
Thou'lt tell me all the constants of thy love;
And so we two shall all love's lemmas prove,
And in our bound partition never part.

For what did Cauchy know, or Christoffel,
Or Fourier, or any Boole or Euler,
Wielding their compasses, their pens and rulers,
Of thy supernal sinusoidal spell?

Cancel me not -- for what then shall remain?
Abscissas, some mantissas, modules, modes,
A root or two, a torus and a node:
The inverse of my verse, a null domain.

Ellipse of bliss, converge, O lips divine!
The product of our scalars is defined!
Cyberiad draws nigh, and the skew mind
Cuts capers like a happy haversine.

I see the eigenvalue in thine eye,
I hear the tender tensor in thy sigh.
Bernoulli would have been content to die,
Had he but known such A squared cos two phi.

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.)

Similar ressurection in 1998 for 50th anniversary

[davidwr]

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.

Re:FIRST electronic computer???

[jd]

The title is misleading. The Baby and MMk1 are the first all-electronic (no mechanical elements) fully stored-program (the program was entirely stored in internal RAM, there was no external component to the program) stored-data (there was no external data source either, data was entirely held in RAM) computer. Since this is how people perceive computers in the modern era, for the most part, this is usually shortened to "first modern computer".