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Computer Pioneer Geoff Tootill Passed Away (theguardian.com)

Posted by EditorDavid on from the living-for-almost-a-century dept.

"Computer pioneer Geoff Tootill passed away in October," writes long-time Slashdot reader tigersha. Born in 1922, Tootill began his career troubleshooting airborne radar systems during World War II, leading him to some pioneering research in the late 1940s. "He worked on the first computer that stored a program in main memory, as opposed to a paper tape, and actually had the opportunity to teach Alan Turing and debug one of Turing's programs." The Guardian remembers: The computer could store just 32 instructions or numbers using a single cathode ray tube. The machine first worked in June 1948, taking 52 minutes to find the highest factor of 262,144, involving about 3.5 million arithmetic operations. The following year, Tootill transferred to Ferranti, the Manchester-based electrical engineering company, to specify a full-scale computer...the world's first commercially available computer.
That was the Ferranti Mark I, first released in 1951.

Tootill passed away at the age of 95.

36 comments

  1. Farewell by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Farewell Sir, and thank you for everything that you helped create.

    1. Re:Farewell by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Yes. In before the Usual Gang Of Idiots descends.
      Frankly, I had never heard of Tootill until just now, but I can't keep up with the passing of so many recently in my own, related, field. I only just found out that a Biography has been written about Frank Oppenheimer. I have Ghiorso's Biography. (I'm in it... barely.)

      Wikipedia hasn't much to say about Tootill. Digging a bit further:
      "Relief came in 1973 when he transferred to the National Physical Laboratory to work on the European Informatics Network. This was an experimental computer network that established technologies now used in the internet."

      Although a general perception is that "The Internet" was invented in Silicon Valley; the truth was that it was an International endeavor, where competition and cooperation often tangled. The EIA was an attempt to sort out some kind of Standards. Standards are the Internet, not the proprietary DECnets and SNAs common then.
      Tootill certainly had a long and varied career. And he outlived Ghiorso by three years.
      That gives me another four decades to find something useful to contribute.

    2. Re:Farewell by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      "The Internet" was born as a DARPA project aimed at creating a distributed network capable of operating when segments of the network went down in the event of a major war or other catastrophe. The DARPA project was more about researching what types of networking hardware and low level software capabilities would be needed to create such a distributed network. A more accurate statement would be that "Silicon Valley" was created by the Internet not the other way around. And it is ironic that "Silicon Valley" is destroying the Internet as they aggressively monetize every byte of data transiting across the Internet.

      It's way past time for the Internet to be defined as a public utility for regulatory purposes. Google, Apple, Facebook, Twitter, ISP's, and all the other big name players need to fall under the same FCC regulations as TV and Radio broadcasting companies. Had Russia been found buying TV political ads the broadcaster would have been liable to billions of dollars worth of fines and sanctions for violating political advertising regulations. Google controls the largest advertising monopoly in the world and operates with impunity in the US due to the billions of dollars spent buying politicians. Google and Facebook make the NSA or CIA look like rank amateurs when it comes to collecting, storing, analyzing the personal data from everyone using any of their services or products. Facebook has created a platform geared to do one thing. Collect all of the user data they can from people using their services. Facebook is an advertising company just like Google and Twitter. While people complain about security agencies violating their own warped definition of privacy 3 of the top 5 corporations in the world make their money by using AI to target users with their own personalized advertisements.

    3. Re:Farewell by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Although you are right about just about everything else, you are still wrong about "The Internet". DARPA was certainly the largest contributor to the US involvement in what became "The Internet", but D/ARPAnet wasn't the only US Public Network, and Networks were growing elsewhere without any US Government involvement, just waiting to hook up together. Thus the EIA, an experiment in Fault Tolerant Networking. The Continental part was largely funded through the French Government's CYCLADES Network. Tootill's work for the EIA was through Britain's National Physical Laboratory.
      DARPA was nowhere to be seen there.
      (FWIW, my involvement in this started in the Autumn of 1979, trying to get a bunch of MODCOMPs, DECs, and Intel Minis to play nice. My task was very boring indeed, finding a way to run Network Diagnostics independently of Network Traffic. That Tech, that Apollo, (The Computer Company), eventually adopted went nowhere, unless Transcontinental PONG matches count... between Screen Savers.)

      "It's way past time for the Internet to be defined as a public utility for regulatory purposes."
      By whom, exactly? The US Government could go all Norks on the US Infrastructure, and the Internet would continue merrily, or not so merrily, on elsewhere. Facebook and Google don't care at this point where they are headquartered. But that is not the Plan.
      The Internet does not belong to the United States Government, although I certainly agree that it has done a piss-poor job of Internal Regulation, of providing Universal Access, and of educating its Citizenry. That asshole Pai has already killed off US Lifeline Service; his long game is delivering the US Internet to Verizon and Co., all of it, unregulated and free of charge. This is called Deregulation and Privatization. He did not come up with this concept on his own. These jerkoffs find Public Custodianship an anathema, and that putting the Fox in charge of the Henhouse is a damn fine idea... for the Fox. Whoever actually owns the Henhouse, the Public, can go sit and spin.

      But this Subject is supposed to be about Tootill, his contributions, and his legacy, and not about a Trans-Atlantic Pissing Match. I have mentioned Tottill by name five times now... and you haven't mentioned him even once.
      Why are you here, exactly?

  2. In modern terms by fahrbot-bot · · Score: 3, Informative

    The computer could store just 32 instructions or numbers using a single cathode ray tube.

    About the same as our average current politician.

    The machine first worked in June 1948, ...

    [ see above ]

    --
    It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
    1. Re:In modern terms by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      get a life.

    2. Re:In modern terms by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      A single cathode ray tube is more than anyone will ever need.

    3. Re:In modern terms by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      One of the pioneers of modern computing has passed away and you can't even manage a comment that is informative, insightful or witty.

      Go back to your mothers basement and think about it a more

    4. Re:In modern terms by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Well I for one would welcome our cathode ray tube-owning overlords!

  3. I knew Slashdot Was Behind, But Damn by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Last month = news now? Jesus

  4. Re:Yawn by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    It affects you because had it not been for him, you probably wouldn't be writing this stupid comment to be seen by millions.

  5. Re:Yawn by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    People say this, but it's pretty asinine.

    Who the hell wasn't working on an atomic bomb during World War II? Sure, we got there first. Doesn't mean if Einstein had been stuck in Germany with the expected horrifying outcome in that case, we wouldn't have atomic bombs.

    Likewise, that dumb fuck up there would still be shitposting even if Tootill never was.

    Mad respect to Tootill, by the by, but people don't just single-handedly invent shit and then hand it down from on high.

  6. Android or iPhone by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    What did he use?

  7. Re: The Guardian by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    It that is a troll, you suck. If it's not, you're dumb

  8. Re:Yawn by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    Szilard invented the atom bomb (and got patent for it). He was friends with Einstein and shared a patent with him for a gas powered refrigerator. He was the one who wrote to Roosevelt warning him of the chance that the Nazi's could build such a bomb, but did not have the clout or notoriety of Einstein, so convinced Einstein to send the letter.

    It's scary to think what would have happened if Hitler had waited a few more years before starting the war. Germany would have been invincible.

  9. 131,072 by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    took me about 5 seconds.

  10. Old people and computers... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Ayup, old fogeys will never understand computers and the wild wild web...

  11. Re:Yawn by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Because history is interesting. Find a new place to lurk if you don't find anything on here interesting to you. Go hang out at Yahoo News or something.

  12. highest factor of 262,144 by ortholattice · · Score: 2

    FTA: "52 minutes to find the highest factor of 262,144, involving about 3.5 million arithmetic operations"

    I wonder what algorithm they were using. 262144=2^18, so the highest (prime) factor is 2, and almost any algorithm (such as the sieve of Eratosthenes) would try 2 first.

    1. Re:highest factor of 262,144 by daveime · · Score: 3, Interesting

      I wondered this also. I'm guessing at that time, they perhaps didn't have MUL or DIV instructions, or even the concept of SHL or ROL which would have allowed a test for "divisible by 2".

      So I'm guessing they started with a "factor", example 2, added it together repeatedly until it equalled or was greater than the target, remembering how many additions were made. If equal to the target, repeat the addition half the number of times, and replace that with the old target, and output 2 as a factor. If greater than the target, try the next "factor" 3,5,7 etc etc.

      Repeat until target = 0

      It's surprising how relatively recent native MUL and DIV operations are in processors.

    2. Re:highest factor of 262,144 by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Informative

      From the Wikipedia article on the computer (the "Manchester Small-Scale Experimental Machine", aka "Baby"):

      The first of three programs written for the machine found the highest proper divisor of 2^18 (262,144), a calculation that was known would take a long time to run—and so prove the computer's reliability—by testing every integer from 2^18 1 downwards, as division was implemented by repeated subtraction of the divisor. The program consisted of 17 instructions and ran for 52 minutes before reaching the correct answer of 131,072, after the SSEM had performed 3.5 million operations (for an effective CPU speed of 1.1 kIPS).

    3. Re:highest factor of 262,144 by iggymanz · · Score: 1

      Some of the "one-off" computers had them, the binary floating point Z3 had multiply and divide in 1941 (but no condional branching, ha!). ENIAC, decimal computer, finished in 1945 did too.

    4. Re:highest factor of 262,144 by Agripa · · Score: 1

      I wondered this also. I'm guessing at that time, they perhaps didn't have MUL or DIV instructions, or even the concept of SHL or ROL which would have allowed a test for "divisible by 2".

      A single shift left can be replaced by adding a register to itself. In some ISAs, one might be preferred to the other if they affect different flags.

  13. Re:Yawn by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Just for that I'm going to come here three times as often just to spite you.

  14. Re:Yawn by Cutterman · · Score: 1

    "It's scary to think what would have happened if Hitler had waited a few more years before starting the war."

    Not really, for a LOT of reasons apart from the A-bomb that I won't go into.

    As for the A-bomb, the Third Reich was extraordinarily disorganised, to a large extent because of Hitler's attitude of "divide and rule" towards both his generals and administration. He enjoyed setting ministries to squabble among themselves and never trusted the higher echelons of the Army or his scientists That anything ever got done was more in spite of him than because of him, and a tribute to the German nation.

    Scientifically, Germany had "blown it's brains out" by devaluing non-military science and compelling a large number of it's top scientists to flee the country (the discoverers of fission, Lise Meitner and Otto Frisch left Germany in 1938/9).

    Eventually a research program was approved and funded, but it was split up among nine major institutes with no significant coordination. The project to develop the atom bomb was shelved in autumn 1942 and the only serious nuclear pile at Haigerloch never achieved anything near criticality. By 1943, Allied bombing had gravely damaged German production capacity and fuel shortages were becoming a worry.

    By contrast, the American Manhattan Project was a massive, single-minded feat of production and coordination that employed >130,000 people and cost about $2 billion (say $23 billion in 2007 dollars) for an unguaranteed result.

    Despite the phenomenal development of the V2/A4 rocket (which impressed Hitler hugely despite its negligible impact on the War), after 1938 Germany simply did did not have either the huge sums of money or the scientists to get anywhere near an A-bomb.

    One can speculate that with a 1933 Chancellor as determined as, but less erratic, more sanguine and less anti-Semitic than Hitler, Germany could have developed a deliverable atomic bomb, perhaps by 1947. But then, a wiser Hitler would have avoided the War altogether (Germany was already booming by 1933) and German domination of Europe come 50 years earlier!

    Mac