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Edsac Goes Live, At UK's National Museum of Computing
Rambo Tribble (1273454) writes "Britain's National Museum of Computing has flipped the switch on the venerable Edsac computer. The arduous task of reconstructing the 1949 behemoth, fraught with little in terms of the original hardware or documentation, was brought to fruition on Wednesday. As project lead Andrew Herbert is quoted as saying, "We face the same challenges as those remarkable pioneers who succeeded in building a machine that transformed computing." A remarkably shaky video of the event, replete with excellent views of the floor at the videographer's feet, can be found here."
So, the word 'fraught' doesn't appear in TFA. And there's probably a reason for that.
Fraught doesn't mean "without the benefit of".
So, to continue this egregiously bad bit of writing ....
Wiff his trusty condoms, Ralph fraught he'd be safe, but, alas, he fraught wrong and got the clap anyway.
Bereft, perhaps. But, fraught??? Really???
Come on guys. Don't just use words you don't know what they mean because they sounded cool in another context.
Oh, wait, I'm assuming editors have a grasp of the language and actually read the submissions. My bad.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
just don't vacuum up the spills, let the kiddies roll it around in their palms like we did. probably be a more efficient way to pick it up.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
The Colossus and Bombe replicas were amazing achievements, and they just keep going. Building complex machines with nothing but some photographs to go on.
Where's my 'we're not worthy' emoticon? _o_
It's not finished yet. They have the clock and the delay line memory working, but it can't run programs.
Nah, space isn't for silly things like computers - it's for important things like non-stick frying pans and biros that write upside down*.
(The comms satellites, GPS, remote sensing and general coolness of landing robots on comets and stuff might count for something, too)
* Don't bother with the snopes links - I'm being silly.
In a survey of 100 programmers, 111111 thought that duck-typing was a good idea.
It's 512 words, not bytes. Each word was over two bytes long. Memory was word-addressable.
That computer really was an earthshaking milestone, as the video clearly shows.
Space did not exist until the Soviets discovered it in 1957.
Have gnu, will travel.
The BBC's style guide says that if an acronym is to be pronounced as a word (Nasa, for example) then it is to be capitalised like a proper noun. If the acronym is not pronounced as a word (BBC, NSA), then it is written in all upper-case. The more you know!
space: V2 missiles: WAR!
Watch this Heartland Institute video
Each word was over two bytes long.
True, each 18 bit word was a little over three bytes long - the EDSAC used 5 bit characters.
A byte is the amount of memory used to store a character, not 8 bits.
Watch this Heartland Institute video