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ENIAC, the forgotten story
One of the most amazing things about their very overdue story is that most of us have never heard of either of them.
ENIAC: The Triumphs and Tragedies of The World's First Computer author Scott McCartney of the Wall Street Journal pages 262 publisher Walker rating 8/10 reviewer Jon Katz ISBN summary The forgotten men who built the world's first computerQuiz:
Who invented the telephone?
The electric light bulb?
Launched the first manned flight?
We all know, of course. We've been schooled from the age of five to know. The creators of some of the greatest American technology are legends, household words, patriotic icons and shamans, their homes and labs turned into historic landmarks and museums.
But who built the first electronic computer?
A group of sixth-grade New Jersey students, asked that question earlier this year, divided their responses between Bill Gates and Steve Jobs. A nine-year-old Virginia student guessed, "Radio Shack."
The fact that most people - even on a website like this - have no idea of the answer is why Scott McCartney's "ENIAC: " "the Triumphs and Tragedies of the World's First Computer" is such a smart and timely book. Talk about prophets without honor.
Computing hit like the Big Bang. The International Data Corporation (IDC) estimates the amount of commerce conducted over the World Wide Web will top $1 trillion by 2003. Yet the Net's history is murky. The people who profit from modern computers are well known, but the people who actually developed them are forgotten.
Last week, as the Internet celebrated its 30th birthday, a scientist present at the UCLA lab (the first node of ARPAnet was installed at the UCLA Network Measurement Center, where a research group connected the IMP to their Sigma 7) where it was partially created told a reporter that nobody even bothered to take a picture.
Scott McCartney, a staff writer for the Wall Street Journal, decided to remedy that sad reality. His book tells the virtually unknown story of two scientists, the late John Mauchly and Presper Eckert, and their tenacious three-year struggle to build the legendary ENIAC in a secret workshop at the University of Pennsylvania. Mauchly and Eckert are rarely written about in computer anthologies and histories, not even mentioned in Stephen Segaller's otherwise thorough "Nerds 2.0.l, A Brief History Of The Internet" published last year. A plaque at the University of Pennsylvania commemorates the spot where ENIAC was put together, but doesn't even list the names of its inventors.
Mauchly and Eckert were obsessed with the idea of using electricity to make computing machines "think." Ridiculed and ignored by their colleagues, they found unlikely benefactors in the U.S. Army, desperate to find some way to calculate artillery shell trajectories as the Allies were getting chopped to bits attacking entrenched German positions in Italy and World War II.
Despite the fact we more or less know how it turns out, "ENIAC" is a scientific thriller, with McCartney skillfully and knowledgeably tracing the assembling of this unprecedented machine, with its countless vacuum tubes, cables and gears.
Although ENIAC was commissioned at the beginning of the War, Mauchly and Eckert didn't finish it until the fall of 1945, as peace descended. It had taken 200,000 man-hours of work and cost $486,804.22. What the Army got for its money was a thirty-ton monster that filled 1,800 square feet - the size of a three-bedroom apartment in many cities. What the rest of us got was modern computing, the Net and the World Wide Web.
ENIAC had forty different units, including twenty accumulators, arranged in the shape of a U, all connected by a ganglion of heavy black cable as thick as fire hose. It was 1,000 times faster than any numerical calculator, 500 times faster than any existing computing machine. In thirty seconds, ENIAC could calculate a trajectory, something that would require twenty hours with a desk calculator, or fifteen minutes on the machine then called the Differential Analyzer. Today's supercomputers, ENIAC's descendants, can perform the same task in three microseconds.
In the wrong hands, this would be a potentially Byzantine and impenetrable tale, but McCartney presents it with the perfect blend of skill, clarity, and most remarkably, humanity. He never forgets, or lets us readers forget, that like any story about technology, this is really a story about human beings. Mauchly and Eckert are well-drawn, fully developed characters in this powerful but ultimately sad, story.
Although the pair worked brilliantly together to build ENIAC, in the aftermath, their relationship, their work and their personal lives all suffered. Beset by back-stabbing, academic and legal intrigues, their own great naivete, and by financial and private setbacks, they were outflanked and financially outmaneuvered by other scientists, and by IBM and other emerging firms. Although they belatedly filed a patent on ENIAC, they spent much of the rest of their lives unsucessfully defending their invention against legions of claimants and competitors.
Worse, they have been almost universally forgotten by the astonishing subculture they made possible - at least, until now.
"ENIAC" is a not only a compelling and entertaining read, but offers the added satisfaction of helping right one of the more egregious oversights of the Information Age.
Purchase this book at Amazon.
Transistor: Robert Shockley.
Very clever man but some very unfortunate views on society. Clever but bonkers.
If were gonna take designers into account, then perhaps Charles Babbage should get a mention with his 'first universal turing machine' (The Analytical Engine), as described by Lady Ada.
couple of the other "chunks" are still on display at EE building of upenn, philly. rest of them, as you say, are in smithsonian, i'm told by others as well. also, there was a software simulator of eniac - as you have guessed, it paddles in a nop loop some 90% of the time, to match the speed of the orignal eniac. anonymous coward, ee '95, upenn.
When did Arthur C. Clarke die? And what is wrong with being anti-Christian anyway? I suppose you think Darwin had it all wrong and we should all use the Kansas Board of Education approved science curriculum.
Um, I think he became an American citizen, something that's noted on his tombstone, no?
So much for the information age.
Same for telephone:
:-).
Bell, 1876?
No, Philipp Reis, 1860/61
If you ask a Frenchmen you will probably hear a
third name
Same for telegraphy:
Morse, 1837?
No, it was S. Th. von Sömmering, 1809!
Echelon Keywords: Allah Semtex Castro Plutonium Pakistan Jihad Fnord Intelsat Yakima Sarin Hezballah Fertilizer Bomb Al-Qaidah RSA Sendero Luminoso Linux
I'm just curious, why does Yakima rank as an Echelon Keyword? To me it's just a river, a county and a midsized town in southeastern Washington State.
Perhaps, its a reference to the systematic destruction of the Native American people, since Yakima is a Native American word and the town is surrounded by "Indian" reservations.
Or maybe it's a reference to the nearby Hanford Nuclear reservation. The site of the first nuclear reactor built for the purpose of producing weapons grade plutonium and until very recently a major site for plutonium production.
Or is it the code name of the next chip from intel or OS from Microsoft, both of which are located just on the other side of the Cascade Mountains?
Or maybe it's a conspiracy to subdue most of North America, Japan, and other Asian countries, using mind controlling chemicals which are sprayed as "pesticides" onto the famous "Washington Apples" grown in Yakima and the surrounding areas and distributed throughout the world.
Or maybe it's just a Red Herring meant to throw off the conspiracy theorists.
Any clues?
You can think finite memory as states, and that is exactly what I did (notice the 2**number_of_bits -- although some of the states might be impossible or equivalent with some other states -- so the actual number of them is actually less than 2**nob). And the 2**nob covers also memory which is used as code, stack, data etc. But the number of states is so huge that people don't often notice that computer is just (deterministic) finite state machine. You will notice this if you just calculate the (maximum) number of different states your deterministic machine with finite states can be: N = Number_of_internal_states * (size_of_alphabet ** length_of_tape) * length_of_tape You can consider the number of internal states as set A, the set of all different possible tapes as set B and the set of all the possible read/write-head positions on the tape as set C. Then N is the size of Cartesian product of all those sets: N = |A * B * C| = |A| * |B| * |C| Clearly |A| = number of internal states |B| = size_of_alphabet ** length_of_tape (elementary combinatorics) and Clearly |C| = numer of states So, our computers are just (unreliable) huge deterministic finite state machines. And what is more unfortunate, many people program as they were Universal Turing Machines (= they don't check if memory alloction fails, but our computers just don't have infinite memory -- unlike Turing Machines which have infinite tape).
It's really sad when almost nobody knows who was instremental in developing our "modern" computers. I place most of the blame on our school systems for letting us almost forget the people who built the information technology. That we take for granted everyday.
The book is "surprisingly poignant".
yup
The usual execuses....
...
Anyone who criticizes the Masons in any way (recall that the original posters main complaint was that the Masons promote books by their fellow Masons and that Jon Katz apparantly had Masonic sympathies) must necessarily be
- a conspiracy nut.
- suffering from a severe case of paranoia.
- believe that all Masons ride in black helicopters and worship the devil (I thought this was only the CIA. >:->)
- members of a pro-Inquisition group who, by implication, want to burn everyone else at the stake as heretics (I dunno, presumably, the Catholic Church? Talk about serious paranoia there. If you don't know, the most vociferious critics of the Masons are Baptists and the like PROTESTANT Churches....)
I don't find any evidence of this in the original post. So, who's doing the poor thinking?
I say we give the original poster the benefit of the doubt until we hear what Katz has to say on all this.
Lady Ada was a geek babe!
I'm typing this from work with no access to my personnal library, but didn't Konrad (sp?) Zuse built the first _programmable computer_ even before the allies? Also: Eckert and Mauchly (sp?) are not complete unknowns. They were not completely forgotten. Come on -- anyone who can read has heard of them creating the ENIAC and then going on in the private sector to create what eventually became the UNIVAC-1 (no, "UNIVAC" is not a vaccuum cleaner!). Before hooking up with whathisface Rand, E&M even went to talk to Thomas Watson Sr. (lord high mucky muck of IBM) who told then he would hire them only if they forgot about this "computer" fallacy... Why are people now saying that E&M were forgotten, I don't know... Bruno Majewski
The dude who started the thread is way off base in singling out the Masons....
Lots of fraternities promote their own members in business dealings.
But that still doesn't excuse trying to undermine religious faith in world. If Arthur C. Clarke was a Mason or a Masonic-like fraternity, or whatever (and it sure sounds like it), he probably did achieve at least some of his initial fame through them. Let's face it, it's hard getting breaks like that sometime.
But what angers me the most about the poster I'm responding to is his talk about `anti-inquisition forces'. I read 3001. The book was not only anti-Christian, anti-Jewish, anti-Islamic, anti-anything to do with religion (check out the amazon reviews!). As someone whose relatives were targets of the Holocaust, I'm not especially happy with any group that is trying to protect us from the 'forces of the inquisition' by spreading these kinds of stereotypes about religious people. There are enough enemies of Jews out there in the world as it is....
Protecting us from the 'forces of the inquisition' may be how these fraternities justify their dirty deeds to themselves, but, let's face it: this sort of stuff is motivated by pure self-interest.
And I certainly don't consider protecting us from the 'forces of the inquisition' an excuse for Jon Katz to waste slashdot bandwidth promoting a not-very-good book about computer history when much better books exist in order to win brownie points with his fraternity (if this is indeed what he is doing.)
Turing 'invented' the computer in his mechanical definition found in the 1938 paper 'On Computable Numbers.' This is what we commonly refer to as a Turing Machine (not that he would have called it that). The important aspect of the Turing Machine that separates it from a mere calculator is that it's deterministic. It can decide which calculations to perform based on the results of previous steps. This allows it to be truly programmable.
Babbage cannot be given credit for inventing the computer, because his 'difference engine' did not have the ability to determine its own instruction path (no 'if' statement). So that's basically a glorified slide rule.
However, Turing never actually built his theoretical machine. The stuff he used during the war was a good engineering groundwork for completing the task, and after the war, he attempted a project he called ACE, but due to beauracratic intervention, he was never able to see the project through. (I think someone else took it over, and changed the design to focus more on higher level instructions like + and -, removing the determinism as 'unnecessary.'
Similarly, ENIAC was not a true deterministic machine. The ENIAC team started working on a true computer afterwards (called EDVAC). I'm not sure if they ever finished it.
Invented at GCHQ, then kept secret for 30 years.
Our computers are just finite state machines. They have many states (2**number_of_bits ), but they don't have infinite tape (as Turing machine).
I'm sure that Bletchley Park in the UK housed the first computer, created for cracking the enigma communcations. At first it was mechanical computers but later there was a proper electronic system. The UK never told anyone at the time of course, because it was a wartime secret, in fact it was more or less kep secret until the mid seventies when the project was exposed by one of the workers. Of course this wasn't a proper computer, but neither was Eniac - wasn't the world's first stored programme machie the Baby build at Manchester University?
>>Since the computer was destroyed in an air raid, the chances are good that it was being used for military purposes... Yeah, pretty well everything the military manage to hit just happens to turn into a target. Helps to keep the stats looking good.
Being an alumnus of the University of Florida, it is seldom mentioned that Dr. Atanasoff got his first degree at UF! Quoting from: http://www.agen.ufl.edu/~abe4932/unit1/atan.htm "Atanasoff, 'J.V" to his friends, is one of the most distinguished alumni of the University of Florida College of Engineering. He was so recognized with an honorary doctorate of science degree from UF in 1974. He received his bachelor's in electrical engineering from the University of Florida in 1925." Quoting from: http://www.cs.iastate.edu/jva/jva-archive.html "Throughout much of the last 50 years, John W. Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert have been credited with inventing the electronic digital computer. On October 19, 1973, US Federal Judge Earl R. Larson signed his decision following a lengthy court battle which declared the ENIAC patent invalid and named Atanasoff the inventor of the electronic digital computer -- the ABC. In recent years some authors have attempted to correct historical inaccuracies which have loomed for decades."
(marginally off-topic, but not toxically so) The real horror story of British cryptographic secrecy concerns what happened to Alan Turing after the war. Turing basically masterminded Bletchley Park, and did a lot of the design work on Colossus (for what it's worth, I would not consider Colossus the "first computer" because, IIRC it was not a universal Turing machine, which would be my criterion for "computerness". I'm less certain about the MkII, however). Then he settled down to life after the war as a mathematician. But unfortunately, one of his lovers burgled his house, and in reporting the crime to the police, Turing accidentally revealed that he was gay. We treated him shamefully. Turing saved us quite literally from salvation in the Battle of the Atlantic, and we pumped him so full of "experimental hormone treatments" that he grew breasts. Unsurprisingly, he committed suicide. A pretty shocking way to treat a war hero, one might say. But, of course, nobody knew that he was one. He wasn't allowed to plead his war record, because it was all so very confidential. Pretty sick if you ask me. jsm
I am thinking about getting a group of people together to go see it. If you want to join, you can reach me at bob@subgenius.org
Serious? I could have sworn that Mauchly and Eckert got no where until John Von Neuman showed up... and it's rumored (though Von Neuman denied it completely) that he must have at some time read Turing's paper- becuase Von Neuman's design is a little too similar to Turing's machine for it to be a coincidence. besides- Mauchly and Eckert just wanted to make some cash- had Von Neuman not published bits of their research today we would buy all of our computers from Eckert & Mauchly Enterprises... But from my point of view- It's Von Neuman and Turing.
it ran at about 20mph as far as i remember. there was an exclent series on Channel 4 (UK) about Bletchly and how it helped in WWII. also the story of how alan turing broke the first german enigma in two days ;) anyway try the website: http://www.bletchleypark.org.uk/history.htm
One of the most amazing things about their very overdue story is that most of us have never heard of either of them.
Speak for yourself. We're not all hype-monging "writers" here Mr Katz. Some of us have actually taken the time to study the history of computing.
Alexander Graham Bell lived in Scotland, then in Canada in Nova Scotia and Brantford, Ontario, then moved to the Eastern US. Some of Bell's work on the hydrofoyle took place in Nova Scotia, while much of the telephone research was done in Brantford. Much of the telephone work was also done in New York state. I believe that his work on the oscilloscope was done when Bell lived in Boston, where he worked with the deaf. Interestingly, at the Chicago museum of Technology, the only notable event in Bell's life citizenship-wise is apparantly the date of his becoming a US citizen. His life and work in Canada is apparantly not worth mention. Such selective reading of history by people of any nation does nothing but impoverish. As a Canadian, I am often irked by US myopias, but we have plenty of our own here too. For instance, I don't know much at all about where Bell came from in Scotland or his family there, etc. Bell's tombstone DOES carry the inscription "..an American citizen", so one must not downgrade the importance of that fact. However, if you are an US citizen reading this, I ask you how much of this non-US content you learned growing up.
I have no information to back this theory up at this point, but I am guessing the nazi's funded Konrad Zuse's work. Zuse would have had to belong to the nazi party to recieve funding, most of the german intellects at that time belonged to the nazi party. Since the computer was destroyed in an air raid, the chances are good that it was being used for military purposes. This would explain why ENIAC is considered the first computer, the victors write the history.
Ah, but was it by choice, in those days you were automatically reclassified American if you were white, & lived there, more than so many years.
http ://www.the-times.co.uk/news/pages/tim/98/11/10/tim obiobi03003.html?1048521
Colossus was a mechanical computer
The integrated circuit was invented at pretty much the same time by Jack Kilby of Texas Instruments and Robert Noyce of either Fairchild Camera and Instrument (parent of today's Fairchild Semiconductor) or Intel (I can't remember which company he was with at the time). Who was "first" was the subject of an approx. 15 yr. patent dispute between the two companies. The idea of putting more than one component on a monolithic chunk of silicon is generally acknoledged to be though of by Kilby first, while the method for interconnecting said components was devised by Noyce, and his team.
"I may be wrong here, but 1945 minus three years does not equal the start of the second world war, unless you define the second world war's span only in terms of US involvement."
Why was this rated off-topic? Such implicit mental math can lead to unhealthy mental short-circuits. Lots of people died between 1939 and 1943.
But sad that they waited for 20 years after the US patents, until after Ellis had died, before telling anyone. That was just gratuitous.
The World Series was named after a newspaper called the World. The name isn't supposed to mean "world-wide".
Katz, you're probably just trying to push the book of some fellow member of your Masonic fraternity. I don't know for sure you or the author are Masons , but your Masonic sympathies have become quite clear in your past posts on here with catch phrases urging us to support the "New World Order" It may be a good book on early computing history, but there are dozens of good books on early computing history written by authors who are not Masons. I don't see why someone should make more money in selling their books just because they happen to be a Mason. I'm particularily upset with Arthur C. Clark's published book 3001, which we had published after his death through his will to satisfy his Masonic friends, many of whom apparantly helped push his career. This book contained all sorts of anti-Christain ramblings (one or two chapters were little more than a direct attack on Christainity.) Clarke probably promised this book to his Masonic friends who, in exchanged, promoted his earlier works. And, as another poster pointed out, this is the site for nerds; many of us know this stuff! I would much rather purchase a computing history textbook from someone who wasn't a Mason; this way, I wouldn't someday find my money used in some sort of subversive attack on Western Civilization. Just my $0.02.
Doesn't the Colossus count at all? Or is this just about the first American computer?
I thought the computer was created by some bizarre coupling of steve jobs, woz, and bill gates. i have pictures of this event if anybody wants them
Last I heard, Canada and Japan also play in it.
*Snore* ZZZZZzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz
And Brittain.
Katz, /. has a lot of international readers. All your writing seem very America-centric. Doesn't it bother you even slightly that none of the famous American inventions you mention (along with the computer) were invented by Americans. If you spoke to a Russian who was convinced that Russians had invented ice-cream, hamburgers and micro-chips you would probably think he was suffering from biased education.
Well, we have a chunk of the honest-to-God original Eniac on display at the University of Michigan (in display cases, of course). Maybe we could fire it up, somehow 8-). BTW, this is the only place where you can view pieces of the original machine, outside of the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C. The Ann Arbor Computer Society convenes across the hall from this 'holy' shrine... -- Current President of the AACS.
Yes, American's never invented anything, and all we're good for is cheezy theme parks (oh yeah, and all those awful movies)...
One thing's for sure, based on the posts I've read, you've definitely got us Yanks beat on the nationalistic jingoism front.
**YAWN!**
What really went on in the early days of computing, shrouded in military secrecy as well as a number of parallel efforts is a interesting story. One which many slashdotter's are interested in (and knowledgeable about, regardless of Katz' errors or omissions).
What nationality someone was when they invented something, or where they were at the time, is less so.
First lightbulb: Joseph Swann (an Englishman)
First manned flight: Montgolfier brothers (Frenchmen)
However, First cheesy themepark: Disney (an American)
Just try "konrad zuse" w/ altavista! :) tons of relevant urls it will get you.
I don't think they count. They are not Americans.
You could really say that of all Americans... Go back enough generations and all Americans came from somewhere else (yes, even Native Americans). George Washington was born in Virginia (I believe his parents were born in England) while it was still under British rule. Books I've read refer to him as an Englishman. Yet's he's the father of our country, often regarded as the greatest _American_. Yes, it's true that much of history and what happened is distorted, and people are often unsure of the truth. Look at pizza. The Italians claim it. People say the Italians stole it from the Greek. Some people say that the Greek stole it from the Chinese. The anti-American attitude on Slashdot is way too strong.
that more governments won't release information about their secret computers in the future? Maybe the US secretly had one in 1930. Maybe Japan had one three years before.
Colossus was before ENIAC, the only reason ENIAC is mentioned as 'first' is because Colossus was British.
Everyone knows that the first computer was invented by the Brits. :-) http://www.bletchleypark.org.uk/
... yes.. I have to be the one, if we had an ENIAC today, do you think we could port linux to it? ;)
How we know is more important than what we know.
Iowa State University also lays claims to the first. See http://www.scl.ameslab.gov/ABC/ This was proven in court, with the verdict located near the bottom of http://www.scl.ameslab.gov/ABC/Trial.html
The actual first digital computer was built at Iowa State University in 1939. It's known as the ABC, and was certified in federal court as being the first electronic digital computer, predating the ENIAC. Read about it at http://www.scl.ameslab.gov/ABC/ or in the fine book Atanasoff, Forgotten Father of the Computer, by Clark R. Mollenhoff.
Katz, anyone who has seen the PBS series "Triumph of the Nerds" or "The Incredible Machine" and who didn't fall asleep during, knew that Eckert and Mauchly created ENIAC. You're posting this article on the site for nerds, and claiming that none of us knows who they are? Some of us know our computing history, at least...
Imagine a discussion about animal intelligence - most people would happily assert humans come out top. This would seem laughable to an alien monitoring the discussion from a neighbouring galaxy. Katz is like this with non-americans. I imagine he believes that his examples (telephone, light-bulb, flight) were first invented by Americans or at the very least in America. From earlier articles I got the idea he believes various other things (free speech, democracy, individual rights, the web) are also American inventions. It's not that he's bigoted - its just that he only has the vaguest sense that anything exists outside of America. It's a common fault. The main reason for this is that America is a very large country so you can happily forget about the rest of the world. Europeans would probably be like this too, except that we can barely drive 100 miles without ending up in another country which makes the rest of the world harder to forget about. I also believe that part of the problem comes from a subtle form of propoganda which was necessary during the cold war. Americans had to believe that America == good, anti-American == bad otherwise they would have not had the moral fervour necessary to defeat communism. The worrying thing is, Russians are aware that they were fed a biased form of history for decades, but Americans have no sense of this. Americans really believe they were fed the truth, while everyone else was being lied to. No, we've all been lied to.
I should have done research before I posted these guesses. The Nazis did not fund Zuse's work. After building the Z1, he was unable to convince the Nazi government to support his work. He recieved funding from friends. "During the last days of war the next model Z4 was transported under adventurous circumstances via truck and horse-drawn cart from Berlin to Göttingen and then to the Allgäu. Hidden in a stable it remained undiscovered by the war parties and was later in 1949 transported to the Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule Zürich." Since Zuse kept his computer hidden after the war, it became commonly accepted that the ENIAC was the first computer.
Speaking of recognition, this audience may also be interested to ponder that in the days of Eniac, "software" as we now know it, was not recognized as a part of the invention. The people responsible for coding the obtuse beast in binary were staff of the army computing center where they had previously performed trajectory calculations by hand. Since the men were mostly at war, this office capitalized on the labor of top women in mathematics who were eventually called on to work on programming the Eniac. The pictures we often see of the Eniac in action, showing women walking around it in lab coats were no Vanna Whites but some of Americas first software engineers as we now know them. That's as best as I remember the details anyway. If you belong to the IEEE Computing Society, you can read the full article here: http://computer.org/annals/an1996/a3 013abs.htm
If you're at all interested in computer pre-history, you might be interested in
"From Dits to Bits." It's an autobiographical
account of the author's involvement with ENIAC
and the first UNIVAC machines.
From Dits to Bits: A Personal History of the
Electronic Computer
Herman Lukoff
As someone who is a geek and very interested in computer history, I can tell you from first hand experience that most computer science people, even those of us who have the love for the discipline, don't know anything about the beginnings of the industry. The computer industry and culture is one of the most interesting and varied that there has ever been and it's a shame that nobody knows about it. I think a class on the History of Computing should be mandatory for all CS students and recomended for everybody else.
I had the opprotunity to "teach" an Academic Decathlon team from my old high school about computer industry jargon and the thing most of them wanted when I was finished was more stories about the industry. Most non-geeks/nerds think computer history would be boring but that's before they hear about it. If you're interested, I'd recommend the following books and movies, please reply to this message with more if you have some ideas.
Triumph of the Nerds video
Accidental Empires book that TotN was based on by Robert X. Cringley
Hackers by Steven Levy
Nerds 2.0 video and book
Who invented the telephone? The electric light bulb? Launched the first manned flight?
We all know, of course. We've been schooled from the age of five to know. The creators of some of the greatest American technology are legends, household words, patriotic icons and shamans, their homes and labs turned into historic landmarks and museums.
What a bletcherous load of crap! What is it with American's that you simply cannot accept that you are not the greatest technological nation in the world?
The Telephone was invented by a Scotsman, the electric lightbulb was co-invented by another Scotsman, the first manned flight was most probably made by some lunatic Chinaman strapped to a kite centuries before The Good Ol' US of A had even been thought of. The first heavier-than-air flight was not necessarily made by the Wright brothers, there is significant evidence to support the idea that there was a man (who's name escapes me currently) in New Zealand who made the first aeroplane flight.
Silver
The systems laid down by Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace were as smart if not smarter than ENIAC. Except he got there 100 years before everyone else so I guess that excludes him. And of course we should never forget that the first computer programmer was a woman...
For the true story on the first electronic computer (i.e. one that has the same basic building blocks as the one you are sitting in front off) see http://www.computer50.org/
The Z3 was not fully programmable: Zuse forgot about the Jump and If-then-else instructions. No loops possible, oops. If you wanted the Z3 to do lots of calculations, you had to feed it a long program on punched tape :-) A German description of the Z3's architecture is here.
The first fully programmable computer was Babbage's analytic engine. Steam power rules! Of course, it was never built. Vaporware rules twice! By the way, his GF Ada Lovelace invented the loop. Chicks rule thrice!
The first operational fully programmable computer was ENIAC (you programmed it by replugging cables). Colossus was a secret special purpose cracking machine for the German Lorenz code and hat limited programmability.
--
--
Is a cute little tome I stumbled across at my local library: From Dits to Bits.
Don't recall the author's name, but IIRC he was *there*.
The title refers to morse code (dits) and, obviously, computer's bits, and the book follows the concept of information encoding, through eniac, and chronicles the first attempts at the realisation of a commercial computing system. Fascinating read. These guys had at it like cavemen fashioning a 747 with flint axes. They had to create all their tools from scratch, and hand-over-hand their way up the ladder of creation. Don't know if it's still in print, but it deserves a place right up there w/ Mythical Man Month and Soul of a New Machine.
GREAT book!
Brak: What's THAT?
Thundercleese: A light switch.. of TOTAL DEVASTATION!
MAN! That is SO COOL! Let's port linux to it!
Brak: What's THAT?
Thundercleese: A light switch.. of TOTAL DEVASTATION!
The post is the output of a gibberish generation program. A good one, but probably not totally autonomous. This crap has been seen here before.
Brak: What's THAT?
Thundercleese: A light switch.. of TOTAL DEVASTATION!
Well, the tape is not infinite, but can be extended when needed. :-)
However, the main point of Universal TM was that it could take a coded description of any TM (i.e. a program) and run it. So a UTM could simulate any TM in "software".
...richie - It is a good day to code.
AFAIK, Von Neumann designed what this today's typical computer architecture. You know, one CPU, some memory for storage. Data has to move from memory to the CPU for processing etc...
Was he also the one who realized that programs are just another kind of data that can be stored in memory?
...richie - It is a good day to code.
Okay, let's go back and look at the original wording of the complaint.
I don't know for sure you or the author are Masons , but your Masonic sympathies have become quite clear in your past posts on here with catch phrases urging us to support the "New World Order"
Okay, first the author admits that he doesn't know that Katz is a Mason, but then asserts that he has Masonic sympathies. He knows this because Katz has used the phrase "New World Order" at least once in his life. Oooh, that's a really strong justification. I'm convinced. Oh my god, I typed New World Order, I must be in on it. Fnord.
I'm particularily upset with Arthur C. Clark's published book 3001, which we had published after his death through his will to satisfy his Masonic friends, many of whom apparantly helped push his career.
The 'we' here is interesting. I assume this AC works for whoever published 3001. He claims 'to satisfy his Masonic friends', implying that being Masons is THE MOST IMPORTANT thing about them. It's exactly the same as saying, 'to satisfy his Catholic friends' or 'his Baptist friends'. There's no reason to include the extra info unless it is important, and in this context can only be taken to imply that they had it published BECAUSE they are Masons... not because they are his friends. He also completely ignores the fact that fan demand would probably have gotten the book published anyway, as Clarke was a very popular author. (I didn't like him that much myself. There were a lot of 'lesser lights' that I much preferred. Clarke was too gloomy.)
ANYway.. here's a nice bit of paranoia:
This book contained all sorts of anti-Christain ramblings (one or two chapters were little more than a direct attack on Christainity.) Clarke probably promised this book to his Masonic friends who, in exchanged, promoted his earlier works.
The author is asserting that Clarke wrote anti-Christian texts in exchange for favors. Wow. In other words, Clarke didn't just believe that Christianity was bad for humanity and write about it. No, it had to be some bargain to promote the Masonic agenda. The simple explanation won't suffice -- it must be complex.
And, as another poster pointed out, this is the site for nerds; many of us know this stuff! I would much rather purchase a computing history textbook from someone who wasn't a Mason; this way, I wouldn't someday find my money used in some sort of subversive attack on Western Civilization. Just my $0.02.
So now we've gone from being Masonic to plotting the demise of Western Civilization. (see above for one alleged plot.) I'm sorry, but A does not lead to B. I absolutely know of at least one exception, and no, it does not prove the rule.
Okay, re: black helicopters and Satan and all that... admittedly, our AC did not mention those. I am indeed guilty of a presumption. I have argued a number of times with a number of people on this particular subject, and every single time I run into someone who is into Masons and their 'evil plots', it ends up in Illuminati and Satan. I baselessly projected that into the discussion before it arrived by itself.
However, you misstate me badly in the last bullet point. I don't presume that this AC wants to burn people at the stake. I'm sure that's the last thing he wants to do. He is, however, attacking an organization whose principal purpose is preventing another such horror from happening. My implication is that it is a bit unwise to take the word of organizations that HAVE tortured and killed about organizations that probably have not and are opposed to first's torture.
Now, are the Masons actually up to something? It's possible. Fraternities, as someone else was commenting here, do tend to look out for their own, and the Masons have been around a long time. I'm sure there's more than a few rotten apples in a barrel that big. However, from an individual standpoint, continuing the status quo is likely to be the most lucrative and beneficial course. What would they have to gain from attacking Western Civilization? They sure stand to lose an awful lot.... they have a lot of wealth and power in the current system.
The only answers I have gotten to that question have, so far, been frenzied frothing about bargains with Lucifer, the 33rd degree, Satanic rites and blood sacrifice. Usually with black helicopters, New World Orders, and conspiracies so deep and dark that they span hundreds of years, continents, and cultures, yet somehow have remained mostly secret.
Sorry, I don't buy those. If our AC can come up with a better reason, or if you can, please go ahead. You certainly can't do much worse than the answers I got before. :-) Conspiracies are like murders -- to hang together, they have to have a means, a method, and a motive/payoff. The bigger the conspiracy is, the larger the payoff needs to be to maintain it.
I submit that fear of torture and persecution is a strong enough motive to hold an organization together for hundreds of years, and that intent to conspire simply is not strong enough a motivation no matter WHAT the potential payoff is. I haven't heard many other plausible reasons to hold together an organization whose intent is the demise of Western Civilization. Remember, that same organization was instrumental in building a good chunk of it, and its existence predates Western Civilization by quite some time.
Sorry, it just doesn't hang together.
Alexander Graham Bell was not born in the US, he was born in Scotland. He did not die in the US, he died at his home-for-half-a-year-every-year-he-lived-this-side -of-the-atlantic in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, Canada. He is not buried in the US, his bones lie on Canadian soil, in a place where Scottish culture holds strong (French culture also has a hold, it's all just boiled together over time). I'll grant that his invertions found there way to the US patent office 'technically' making them US inventions, but the MAN would have to be called a Scottsman more than anything.
I think that the ABC Computer was first. Check out this website for more info...
http://www.iastate.edu/abc.html
Joseph W. Breu
I don't know whether anyone will read a post this far down, but I was offline in Amsterdam all day so I've only just logged in.
...
I have however, something to say on the matter of the 'first computer' debate that may be of interest. As one other post (at least) has pointed out, a number of people were working on similar ideas that arguably resulted in the first computer.
A good analogy is the jet engine. Both Wittel and the Heinkel firm (Britain and Germany respectively) were working on similar ideas at similar times. Ultimately the first jet plane to fly was German, but it is questionable who came up with the idea first.
Can't we just agree that the computer like the jet engine, was brought to frution during wartime, and ultimately benefitted most of us.
There is no love lost between myself and America (as a culture and ideal, not as individuals), but I can't help feeling that this nationalist ``we invented it first'' mentality is fruitless
Chris Wareham
It was the first (in the US) to use binary as its internal representation, and it had a form of dynamic RAM (a cylinder of capacitors that rotated past a brush assembly that kept them refreshed/charged). The sad thing is, this capacitor drum is the only thing that remains. When a grad student (later head of the CS dept) needed an office, he was told that he could have one "if he cleaned the junk out of it". Guess what the "junk" consisted of?
Just junk food for thought...
Prior to that, I believe that a German University had built a digital computer, in the 1930's. I don't think that this resulted in significant research beyond preliminary experiments.
By any standards, the first digital computer that was used to do something would be Colossus which predated ENIAC by years.
I really hate the kind of centrism that mandates that history needs to be rewritten so that one's country can be favored in the eyes of the world. Scott McCartney is wrong, wrong, wrong about ENIAC being first. I wouldn't put much credibility in a history book that gets something as primary as this incorrect.
Eckert and Mauchly were the tandem Henry Ford of the computer industry -- whether or not they were the first people to build a computer, they were the first to create a commercially-available computer. (Although this being Slashdot, someone will likely soon post contradictory info.... :)
-- Dirt Road
-- Dirt Road
Improvise - Adapt - Overcome (unofficial USMC motto)
One of the Manchester machines (I cannot remember if it was the Mark I or the SSEM) was a stored program computer, and therefore the first electronic stored program computer. There were probably mechanical predecessors though.
Looking back, there is a continuity of calculating machines all the way back to the abacus, each of which was the first to implement some notable feature of modern computers.
Z3, ENIAC, Colossus, ABC, Mark I, fine. Does it really matter who's first with these things? These were all, indeed, programmable devices, but if you saw one today, it wouldn't resemble what we all call a computer. Indeed, they were only incrementally better than punched card tabulating machines, which by that time, could be configured to execute more than simple counting and additions.
These devices were not stored-program computers: you had to physically reconfigure them for each new program, instead of supplying your program along with your data.
ENIAC, schmENIAC. Remember Mauchly and Eckert, but remember them because they went on to found UNIVAC Corp., and to design and produce the UNIVAC, the first commercially available stored-program electronic computer, indeed, the first commercially available electronic computer of any kind. The UNIVAC had an immesurably bigger influence on the history of computing than any of these other devices. It was because of the UNIVAC that IBM, for instance (then a manufacturer of punched card tabulating machines), got into the business of making electronic computers, and set them on the path to become the company we all know and love.
This is because the invention of the computer was by a lot of different people, all working on different aspects (a lot started before electricity was there). These guys were just the people who applied what others before them had figured out.
He also mentions the first people on the moon. But that is mostly the personal achievement.
Question: Who was the first person to get any kind of (unmanned) junk launched on the moon. Oh shame, nobody knows......
Turing was also involved with computer-inventions at the same time, but everybody knows him. So it's not like we know nothing of the computers origins (Von Neumann also).
you could get one of uPenn's ENIAC on a chip samples and start porting - not sure how Linux will make use of the "square rooter" but that's a good start on a math-coprocessor.
Chuck
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
yeeetch -
btw - who can name the inventors of the transistor and integrated circuit as easily as the inventors of the light bulb, telephone, powered manned flight?
Chuck
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
I was under the impression that Colossus had now been given the crown of 'First computer' but always with these things it seems to revolve around definitions:
'First stored-program computer'
'First digital computer'
'First digital computer with a stored program'
'First computer with a turbo button'
'First computer youcould play Space War on'
etc...
I had the title as "Insert Colossus/Eniac flame war here" except contained within greater than and less than symbols... evidently the whole thing was removed as a html tag... oops!
The "invention" of the computer is a very complicated subject that I don't think any one book (even a good one like ENIAC) or discussion in /. can come to grips with.
First of all, the ENIAC was something that any current geek would recognize as a computer. I've talked to John Mauchly's widow, Kathleen Antonelli, who was one of the original programmers on the ENIAC, and while it may not have been a stored-memory computer, it was programmable. She coded very close to the machine.
Mauchly was a hacker who had an itch to scratch. He wanted to be better able to model the weather and needed a computer to do it. He didn't set out to "invent" the computer, but to build a tool to get a job done. WWII gave him the resources to do this and changed the job that needed doing.
We also need to remember that history is only obvious in retrospect. Mauchly and Eckert didn't know Turing's work (neither was a mathematician.) It was only after their very practical contribution that the idea of a Turing machine as a real machine began to make sense in any kind of widespread way.
A half-dozen or so people made groundbreaking contributions that coalesced in our idea of the computer. Mauchly and Eckert were certainly among them.
--Tim
Good thing for the rest of us that the Germans had Very Dumb Nazis to counterbalance their Very Smart Scientists.
Reference: Concepts of Programming Languages, Fourth Edition, Robert W. Sebesta.
proof, n. A demonstration that a conclusion is implied by certain premises and axioms.
"I want to use software that doesn't suck." - ESR
"All software that isn't free sucks." - RMS
I think that it would be safe to say that ENIAC was the first computer resembling our current concept of what a computer is. There were numerous earlier calculating machines (some of which were built, others never were completed, i.e. the works of Charles Babbage) Let us not forget the primitive mechanical computers believed to have been in use in ancient Greece...
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...Depends on who you talk to. Eckert and Mauchly have a much different story concerning those events. As you mentioned, Stanislaw Ulam worked closely with Von Neumann at Los Alamos. It may be possible that his writtings are jaded by that fact, he having only heard Von Neuman's side of the story. Of course, this is a much debated topic. In my original post, I noted that the the book /Engines of The Mind/ detailed how Von Neumann tried to take credit from Mauchly and Eckert. I did not say that this was true... /Engines of the Mind/ fails in that the author did not interview any pro-Von Neumann individuals. I believe that the controversy actually began when Von Neumann authored his first paper on the ENIAC and failed to let Mauchly and Eckert know about the it before it was published. According to /Engines of the Mind/ this made it appear that Von Neumann was the primary inventor behind ENIAC.
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Well, not just that. It's simply because nobody has heard of Colossus. It's still officially classified under the British Official Secrets act. It only came to public light after a person who worked on it during WWII wrote a book about it 40 years on. The British government still tried to quash the book even then.
ENIAC was just a calculator too - it produced ballistic tables.
Babbage's analytical engine was built, but a few years ago... using the technologies available in the 19th century.
The reasons why it didn't get built in the first place are 1)Babbage couldn't get it financed and 2)He died.
For the record, the whole thing was the size of a football field and needed six steam engines to run. And it worked! One thing: does anybody know if Babbage was converted to binary or if he was still using base ten for his engine? I'm no-one in maths... I just like history.
I wish I could find a page about it right now, but I feel lazy.
-- It's always darker before it goes pitch black.
Checkout the full story
Lord Pixel - The cat who walks through walls
Lord Pixel - The cat who walks through walls
A little bigger on the inside than out
Actually our computers are a little better than finite state machines - finite state machines have no memory only a state if its a Deterministic FSM or n states if its a Nondeterministic FSM. It might interest you to know that a FSM is equivalent to a regular expression. IMHO our computers are more like turning machines with a finite tape. I've always thought of the microprocessor as a Universal Turing Machine it accepts instructions(equivalent to another Turing machine) and data(equivalent to the tape covered in symbols) and then acts like its that other Turing machine operating on that tape covered in symbols.
Not entirely dissimilar to a definition I've often used, which is that a computer is something you can play Tetris on... It works surprisingly well, apart from the minor problem that it also assumes that little LCD tetris games are computers.
++ Say to Elrond "Hello.".
Elrond says "No.". Elrond gives you some lunch.
I thought Colossus was first, not Eniac.
Unfair! Both sides invented it separately. The key thing to remember is that although the British effort was first, it was classified. Classified crypto is so far ahead of publically available stuff that it's a different race - they are the Ben Johnson 100 meters record holders, where instead of drugs they have superior resources and perhaps most of the best reasearchers.
Chris Morgan
-British and American, as it happens (both passports).
If I am not mistaken Colossus was closer kin to the calculator because it had one single purpose, codebreaking. I guess I can agree with the argument that a computer must be able to accept arbitrary instruction sets with a variable purpose. Otherwise Tic-tac-toe is matrix algebra :-) .
"I've lost my flower," said Tom lackadaisically.
I don't think anyone here has argued any "America is Holier than Thou" statements. So far, I've read a lot of "Us folks in the UK had the first" and one scottish / canadian rant. But no "america is holier than thou" statements at all. Short of the book itself, which isn't nationalistic...just interesting reading about two guys who made a computer back when "a computer" was whatever the hell you wanted it to be.
"A History of Modern Computing" by Paul Ceruzzi is also quite good, and places ENIAC in context.
I ordered my copy from Amazon this morning.
gee
Although I agree with you on technical grounds, that is, the Atanasoff-Berry Computer (ABC) should not be considered the first computer because it was not generally programmable, a judge agreed with Iowa State University in the '70s that the ABC was the first electronic digital computer, which Iowa State now trumpets with much fanfare. I was a CS student there, so I know. Is it any wonder why I transferred? :-)
The ABC was, however, the first machine to use binary arithmetic and to use drum memory (I think). So it's a significant development in its own right, but it wasn't a real computer, even if that's what the legal documents say.
Jon
See my above post. The ABC is a computer only in the eyes of the courts (and Iowa State!). It was not generally programmable, even mechanically. All it did was solve systems of linear equations.
Jon
ENIAC on a chip (linked from ESR's Retrocomputing museum).
--- Premature complacency is the evil of all roots
Interesting that you should ask who invented the light bulb as well as the first computer.
Others have pointed out that Colussus has a pretty strong claim to the first computer (only slightly hampered by the fact that it was officially secret until the 70s).
But are you sure Edison invented the light bulb? Joseph Swan had one earlier (although it didn't work that well).
There are of course strong cultural biases here: I'm British, as were Swan and Colussus. I'm sure a Frenchman could tell you the two Frenchmen who invented the lightbulb & computer, and so on for other nationalities.
And you're just following the American bias on this.
- Alan
If I understand properly, there's a vast difference between a "Von Neumann machine" (a theoretical self-replicating space probe) and a "Von Neumann architecture" (the stored program computers we know and love).
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
wow.. now that's sarcasm you can frame.
How we know is more important than what we know.
This author focuses too much on a hook for his story and not enough on the facts.
Yes, E&M built a computer. With a ton of government money, but with no new ideas. The only "first" is the use of vaccuum tubes. A logic switch is a logic switch. It does not matter much if you use a relay, a vacuum tube, or a transistor.
In fact, years later, the patents were declared invalid. E&M used designs from Atanasoff without attribution.
And the overall architecture was that of VonNeuman.
The war started in 1937, unless you define the second world war's span only in terms of German involvement.
Such implicit mental math can lead to unhealthy mental short-circuts. Lots of asian people died between 1937-1939.
I'm a gnu world man.
"There is no surer way to ruin a good discussion than to contaminate it with the facts."
"There is no surer way to ruin a good discussion than to contaminate it with the facts."
Well, I have to walk past the ENIAC museum here at UPenn in a few minutes, I guess I could proxy for you all and pay my respects to it.
(Although really.. its across from the EE lab, and that's a horrible place to be.. *shudder*)
Ishy "Doobie doobie doo..." --The Penguin
I don't recall which computer was being discussed...But one of my lecturers made the comment that if you wanted to write a program with a loop for this computer ...
...you joined the ends of the tape together, making a loop :-)
--
Repton.
Repton.
They say that only an experienced wizard can do the tengu shuffle.
It was an alien in a galaxy far away many billions of years ago.
Seriously, there wasn't much cross development between the early groups, none of them stole each other's work, so its fair to say they all invented it first. Locally.
"(the UNIAC did) not even mentioned in Stephen Segaller's otherwise thorough "Nerds 2.0.l, A Brief History Of The Internet" published last year.." Nerds 2.0.1 'thorough', that is a joke. It was a horrible book. It did not mention anything about news groups, IRC, UUNET or anything to do with the *real* history of the Internet. Instead, it focused many chapters on Microsoft who did everything for years to kill the Internet. That book is a joke.
Where I can have more info about Zuse's Z3?
Lovely, I missed a key in the href
www.scl.ameslab.gov/ABC
... a case for meta-moderation if there ever was one. How did this ever get marked as "Funny?"
The difference between theory and practice is that, in theory, there is no difference between theory and practice.
Yep, and we invented public key cryptography. Not Diffie or Hellman. That was an "official secret," too.
richi.
I thought they were Von Neumann machines?
Actually, I'm waiting for the BSD camps to claim they ported to it so they can lord this over this heads of the Linux camps. I can see it now...
"See! BSD is technically superior to Linux because it runs on 1940s harware so there!"
:-)
Why? A lot of what people point to as the first digital computers (Colossus, Z3, ENIAC, ABC) were built at (approximately) the same time in relative obscurity. Heck, the teams of researchers probably didn't know much about the others until after WWII! So, It's my belief that computing technology was just waiting to happen. Sooner or later, someone was going to look at the data, research the technology, and get an idea. If you don't believe me, go to segfault sometime and watch the first-posters. You will sometimes get an article with several persons who saw it at around the same time, and reacted to it immediately... as they saw it. Especially in today's world of technology, you can see variances of the same technology, packaged only slightly differently.
So, I propose a grouping, and say that these four computers were the first, all having characteristics that have made their way into the overgrown calculator sitting on my desk. For that, I applaud them all, and refuse to call any individual one the very first.
Indeed.
In the book, "Atanasoff - Forgotten Father of the Computer", by Clark R Mollenhoff, it's described how Mauchly had visited the Iowa State campus in June of 1941, and studied the ABC computer extensively for several days.
It was then found in a court of law that indeed, Mauchly had gotten many concepts for the ENIAC directly from the ABC computer, and Atanasoff was given the credit he deserved.
However, I believe the current school of thought is that the ENIAC is the first large scale digital computer. You cannot look at the ENIAC, though, without also looking at its roots.
"During your times of trial and suffering, when you see only one set of footprints, it was then that I was riding the pogostick."
A good traveller has no fixed plans and is not intent on arriving.
& i guess that's why us in australia were never taught who invented the computer in the firdt place... cuz no one here came up with much
No single person/group "invented" the computer -- just like the telephone, there were at least a dozen variations on a single concept coming out at the same time. If company A releases product X in 1999, but company B releases competing product Y in 2000 because they spent the time for extra research, who's really first? Company B might have gotten to the preproduction model first, for that matter...
;)
Being in Minnesota, I have heard all of this Iowa State propaganda before. I'm believe there's even a school that claims that it came before ISU!
Iowa has the problem of having technology-savvy people with absolutely no inspiration to use it. considered 'really cool' by all but advanced Java In hog country, even now, the power of scrolling text is unimpressive to the masses, and programmers.
By the way my great^2000 grandfather "invented" the wheel, and *his* great^2000 grandfather "invented" fire.
--
E2 IN2 IE?
(marginally off-topic, but not toxically so)
The real horror story of British cryptographic secrecy concerns what happened to Alan Turing after the war. Turing basically masterminded Bletchley Park, and did a lot of the design work on Colossus (for what it's worth, I would not consider Colossus the "first computer" because, IIRC it was not a universal Turing machine, which would be my criterion for "computerness". I'm less certain about the MkII, however).
Then he settled down to life after the war as a mathematician. But unfortunately, one of his lovers burgled his house, and in reporting the crime to the police, Turing accidentally revealed that he was gay.
We treated him shamefully. Turing saved us quite literally from salvation in the Battle of the Atlantic, and we pumped him so full of "experimental hormone treatments" that he grew breasts. Unsurprisingly, he committed suicide.
A pretty shocking way to treat a war hero, one might say. But, of course, nobody knew that he was one. He wasn't allowed to plead his war record, because it was all so very confidential.
Pretty sick if you ask me.
jsm
Fools!
Don't you know that the system known as ENIAC wouldn't have been possible without components first developed by the FSF?
RMS demands tribute! Change the name to GNU/ENIAC, or he'll hassle more reporters!
Nyuk nyuk nyuk... Hey, use BSD and really cheese off RMS.
Then the question becomes who built the first working electronic, stored program, digital computer.
P.S. Except maybe Charles Babagge thought of it too. I haven't studied his Analytical Engine.
...richie - It is a good day to code.
Check out the story on the other side of the pond.
And now you have a chance to hear Konrad Zuse's son talk about his father's work! Check out the Vintage Computer Festival coming October 2-3 at the Santa Clara Convention Center in the Silicon Valley.
Take a look at the web site at www.vintage.org for more info.
This is an event you simply don't want to miss if you are a computer historian, or just want to learn more about the history of our industry. The VCF will feature speakers, exhibits, and a marketplace where you can reacquire your past.
Stupid people will be persecuted to the fullest extent allowed by law.
Sorry... It was early...
Stupid people will be persecuted to the fullest extent allowed by law.
There are a lot of people out there (including myself) working feverishly to preserve the history of the computer industry.
If you have any interest in the subject, or want to find out about your professional roots, check out the VCF. It's also a perfect opportunity to show your kids what it was like back in the good old days before widely available internet access, GUI's, and virtually unlimited computer resources.
There will be exhibits, speakers, and a very active marketplace where you can pick up software, accessories, and even complete systems. One of the speakers will be Konrad Zuse's son, who will surely discuss his father's computers and their place in history relative to ENIAC.
Stupid people will be persecuted to the fullest extent allowed by law.
Actually, there are a lot of people who do collect computers/A> and are working to preserve the history of the computer industry. For example, see if you know what the first personal computer was!
Coming up soon is the Vintage Computer Festival where collectors, historians, and enthusiasts will gather for a week-end full of speakers, exhibits, and trading. Don't miss it if you possibly can!
Stupid people will be persecuted to the fullest extent allowed by law.
/Engines of the Mind/ by Joel Shurkin is another great book that discusses mauchly and eckert in great length, their creating of the ENIAC and John Von Neuman's attempts to claim credit for their work...
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Not only was the ABC built first, but Mauchly got a grand tour of the lab and of ABC years before building ENIAC. In fact, after Mauchly and Eckert had held the patent for a while on the digital computer, it was John Atanasoff's testimony that pretty much helped bust the patent due to prior art. (In fact, Atanasoff and Iowa State had begun putting together a patent application themselves, but WWII intervened, and the application was still sitting in a file cabinet at the university.)
I have forgotten the technical details, but as I recall, ENIAC did have some important technical improvements over the ABC. But the ABC does count as a pre-ENIAC electronic digital computer.
"Cleverness kills wisdom"
-- G. K. Chesterton, What's Wrong With The World
"Von Neumann became interested in the possibilities of electronic computing machines during the Second World War. In the beginning he was primarily concerned with the logic of the operation of such machines, but he was the first to devise a means by which a machine with fixed circuits could deal flexibly with a variety of mathematical problems. Before he had entered the field, the solution of each problem required a different set of wiring connections."
From Chapter 16:
"[D]uring 1944 and 1945, he formulated the now fundamental methods of translating a set of mathematical procedures into a language of instructions for a computing machine. The electronic machines of that time (e.g., the Eniac) lacked the flexibility and generality which they now possess in the handling of mathematical problems...The engineering of the computing machines owes a great deal to von Neumann. The logical schemata of the machines, the planning of the relative roles of their memory, their speed, the selection of fundamental 'orders' and their circuits in the present machines bear heavily the imprint of his ideas. Von Neumann himself supervised the construction of a machine at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton...In receiving the Fermi prize of the Atomic Energy Commission, von Neumann was cited especially for his contribution to the development of computing on the electronic machines..."
As you can see, it was in fact John von Neumann who *invented* the concept of the stored program and thus what we now understand as computers. While perhaps it was others who had the idea that electronic components could be strung together to solve problems (whether it was Zuse, Astanoff/Berry or Mauchley/ Eckert), it was von Neumann's conceptual breakthrough that opened the door to true computing.
DNA is a Turing machine. You, however, being dynamic and emergent, are not.
After all of the recent discussion of copyright, I'm surprised that no-one else has commented on this one... the AC post 'The book has an essential flaw' is cut & pasted exactly from a customer comment on the Amazon.com listing for this book. The original author was juergen@idsia.ch from Lugano, Switzerland. The initial comment was on August 26, 1999, with a followup on September 6.
Andy
The Crystal Wind is the Storm, and the Storm is Data, and the Data is Life
Thing is, I'm not sure what's the basis here for saying these guys invented the first computer. Basically, they fell into anonymity because they failed to produce something worthwhile during the course of WW2. Their computer calculated ballistic trajectories in 15 mins instead of a few hours? Turing, at the same time, was decoding German Enigma and screwing up the German war effort by himself.
It's not what you think of that matters, when it comes to innovation and invention; I probably thought about the concept of the next huge scientific revolution while taking a bath the other day. I once formulated the very basis of Superstring theory when I was in seventh grade. I thought up the idea of Quantum Chromodynamics while half-drunk at a friend's birthday party. I postulated the Internet's impact on commerce in a college philosophy class. The point here is, I couldn't use any of them, put them into an equation or found a company that would make Bill Gates beg me for change.
That is to say: it doesn't matter who thinks it first. What matters is what you do with it, and how fast you can chunk out results. We all get brilliant ideas, and that's why we don't remember who thought of something first, but rather, who invented something practical first.
"There is no surer way to ruin a good discussion than to contaminate it with the facts."
I thought the question "Who invented the first electronic computer?" was pretty much still an open one. Atanasoff, Zuse and various others come to mind. I understand ENIAC was probably the most influential early electronic computer; and a very important milestone, this is still controversial nevertheless.
It is amazing that historians still could not figure who really was the first. On second thought, I don't expect to, there are a lot of controversies in this field(recent examples: Two engineers from an aerospace company (Grumman, I believe) claim to have invented the microprocesor before Intel, and Russians and Americans are still debating on who invented the first superscalar computer).
So, who invented the first electronic computer really? This can turn into a really interesting discussion...
Of course, as with any computer architecture mentioned here, the quintessential Slashdot rule will still apply to ENIAC, and we shall soon see the obligatory posts about porting Linux to ENIAC and running a Beowulf cluster on reconstructed ENIACs.
Zigbee Central: A Zigbee weblog
If you are interested in the history of the first electronic digital computer you really should check out the site
Being an alumnus of Iowa State University, it always irks me when the ABC goes completely unmentioned in the history of computing.
Some information for those interested in such stuff:
;)
According to Bletchley Park (UK):
The world's first programmable computer, Colossus I, was designed and operated in Bletchley Park. It was used to obtain the key to a sophisticated German cypher used personally by Hitler and his High Command. Its success led to the building of ten more Mk II models, which were operational in F Block in 1944. This block, the world's first computer complex, is still standing in Bletchley Park.
But it would appear that programming is open to some interpretation so.. from cranfield univsersity (UK) comes some more information: from their web page
Colossus, hardware details
Input: cipher text punched onto 5 hole paper tape read at 5,000 characters per second by optical reader
Output: Buffered onto relays: Typewriter printing onto paper roll
Processor: Memory 5 characters of 5 bits held in a shift register. Clock speed 5kc/s derived from input tape sprocket holes. Internally generated bit streams totalling 501 bits in rings of lengths equal to the number of mechanical lugs on each of the 12 Lorenz wheels. A large number of pluggable logic gates. 20 decade counters arranged as 5 by 4 decades. 2,500 valves.
Power supplies: +200v to -150v at up to 10A.
Power consumption: 4.5KWatt
Size: Two banks of racks 7ft 6inches high by 16ft wide spaced 6 ft apart. Bedstead, 7ft 6inches high 4ft wide by 10ft long
Colossus, operating cycles
The basic machine cycle: read a character from tape, get bits from bit stream generators, perform up to 100 logic operations, clock result into decade counters.
The cycle determined by the input tape: The intercepted enciphered text tape is joined into a continuous loop with about 150 blank characters in the join. Specially punched start and stop holes indicate the beginning and end of the cipher text.
On receipt of start hole pulse: Start bit stream generators and send sampling pulses to reader output. Execute basic machine cycle until receipt of stop hole pulse: Staticise counter states onto relays. After a delay, reset counters and reset bit stream generators to a new start position.
Colossus programming
All programmes hard wired, some permanently, some pluggable. Conditional jumping possible between alternative programmes depending on counter outputs.
To conclude
does this constitute a "properly" programmable computer? Well it was at least partialy programmable, and the Mark II was even more so, but at the end of the day, as other people have said:
It's all a question of your deffinition
If you ever drop your keys into a river of molten lava, let'em go, because, man, they're gone.
Hi am sick to death of all this 'America is Holier than Thou' crap! America was not the home of the first digital computer, England had Colossus and used it to decipher the Enigma codes (For those of you who are arguing the term first 'useful' computer - I think that covers 'useful', don't you?). Why can't most of you see outside your own country? I mean REALLY! just listen to yourselves!
The significance of Eckert and Mauchly's ENIAC isn't necessarily that it was the very earliest design of a programmable computer. It is generally acknowledged that Charles Babbage had the idea of a machine to do arithmetic, but was limited by the technology of the time. It is intersting to note that ENIAC was put together by Eckert and Mauchly without any knowledge of Babbage and the work that had already been done. (They could have saved themselves a lot of trouble.)
What is MOST important about ENIAC is what it did, and when. It was the first computer project to recieve hundreds of thousands of dollars in funding from the military.
It accurately showed that original plans for the H-bomb would not work.
The unveiling of the ENIAC merited a front page story on the New York Times. It sparked the imaginations of others to build better computers. It proved to everyone that age of electronically mechanized arithmetic had arrived.
The ENIAC's design subsequently spawned the EDVAC, BINAC, and the UNIVAC (Universal Automatic Calculator, which accurately predicted Eisenhower's landslide presidential victory on CBS News, to the disbelief of CBS reporters and sponsors. The last UNIVAC lasted until 1969!)
Indeed, it may be argued which was really the very first computer, but it must be acknowledged that Eckert and Mauchly's ENIAC was the first major breakthrough in the field as far as publicity was concerned. And at the time, every bit of publicity that could be gained was critical to the advancement of computers.
But to get the most clear picture of the history of computers, we must look at it less like a singular, linear thread and more like a tapestry, with many significant things that happened simultaneously, many brilliant minds and contributors, and many stories that led up to what we have today.
Funny about how the history of computing is taught along national lines: I always learnt (I'm British) that the first general purpose computer (the Small Scale Experimental Machine, or SSEM) was built in Manchester, UK, in 1948, and german friends of mine learnt about the Z3 in school. Actually the SSEM was the first machine to store programs in memory: debatably a key component of the general purpose computer. I guess what counts as the first general purpose computer depends upon what you consider a machine needs to count as general purpose. Anyway you can read about the SSEM at Computer 50 .
The book has at least one essential flaw. The first working, fully programmable general purpose computer was Konrad Zuse's Z3 (Germany, 1941). ENIAC (inspired by Atanasoff's earlier, less general designs) was fully programmable too, but came much later (in 1946).
Both Atanasoff (US-American of Bulgarian origin) and Zuse built limited calculators in the 1930s (e.g., 1935-38 Zuse completed the Z1, the first fully mechanical, programmable digital machine, and Atanasoff built electronic devices). But if we include mere calculators among "computers" then neither Zuse nor Atanasoff were first. Non-general purpose devices have been around for a long time (since the days of Leibniz and Pascal).
Z3's switches were based on relays instead of tubes like in ENIAC. This is no fundamental difference. There are many ways of implementing a switch. Today we use transistors, of course.
The Z3 was destructed in an air raid in 1944. It never got the publicity of ENIAC. Still, 1966 - 1995 Zuse finally received uncountable awards and world-wide appreciation as "Inventor of the Computer."