w00t!!

[Calum]

quote:There is still some "argument" as to what was truly the first "computer" as we now think of the word. There was a gay guy who worked for British intelligence during WWII named Turing (sp) who developed a machine for cracking the German Enigma code. The brilliant little queen killed himself a few years later after getting popped on a morals charge by the Bobbies.

How many geniuses have met a premature tragic end, due to their socially backward society, eh?

As to the first computer, the first time the concept was used was during the French Revolution. The bureaucracy required to turn the entire nation around, calculating tax, and so on, and all the numerous details that the new regime demanded required a huge amount of calculation. This was acheived by hiring a large number of accountants and arranging them all strictly in physical order, with each one having a specific task to do, and all those with like tasks arranged just so, in order to get the massive efficiency required.

These men were called computers, and it is said that Babbage witnessed this arrangement first hand, which gave him the idea for his difference engine, some info about which can be found here, and which he got to try out when the Astronomical Society of London commissioned a table of the stars to be worked out.

Here's a good history of the difference engine by the way. It was never finished, due to money and, again, social circumstances.

I'm sure there must have been other independent thinkers who thought along the same lines, oblivious to the work of Babbage and Herschel. For instance, were the stone circles of Europe really big calculators? Utilising the alignment of the heavenly bodies for mathematical purposes? Who knows.


Difference Engine No 2. and Difference Engine No 1.

Link to image
Link to image
Links to pictures of the Difference Engine No 2.

[ July 02, 2002: Message edited by: Calum ]

[voidmain]

quote:Originally posted by lazygamer:

Oh and Linux on C64? If you got one hanging around then go put Newcomer on it.  

Not "Linux", but "Lunix" (notice the "u").  He got me on this one too.  Lunix is not Linux but it is an attempt at a UNIX like OS.

[KernelPanic]

I think the first programmable computer was built in England.

[Sleeping Dog]

You are spot-on right about Babbage, Calum.  I should have been more specific and said "electronic computer" when referring to Alan Turing's "Colossus".  There was even a mechanical "calculating machine" used, I believe, in the 1900 US census that employed punch cards that were stacked and "read".  The US Navy also used a machine on submarines during WWII for aiming torpedoes that was part mechanical and part electronic in its computing function.

By the way, Void Man.  I was chatting with one of my old High School chums who was in that class with me.  He pointed out that I had misspelled IITRAN.  The IIT part of it stood for Illinois Institute of Technology.  Prior to our getting time on the machine at the bank, we had to send the programs there to be run.  There was a 10 day turn around to get the results back in the mail.

Sleeping Dog

[voidmain]

Back when "snail mail" was as fast as electronic messaging.    Very interesting story.  Thanks for sharing!

[Sleeping Dog]

One other funny thing my friend reminded about....the computer at the bank stored information by literally punching holes in a metal tape.  The thing sounded like a freight train.

Sleeping Dog

[creedon]

First: Voidmain; I've got acouple of books here that belonged to my cousin (now deceased).  Their titles are: "Systems Programming" by John J. Donovan pub. 1972 and"Digital Logic and Computer Design" by M. Morris Mano pub.1979; they"re complete Greek (or geek) to me, I never got the basics.
Second: When I was in the Navy, I knew a Gunners Mate that was older 'n God- a real 30-year man; he told me that during the '50's the U.S.S. Iowa did some tests on the fire control system for the 16-inch rifles.  The fire control system was a big calculator that took about a billion bits of information about the firing problem (i.e. ships speed, sea conditions, target speed etc, etc.) chewed on it, and spit out a solution.  This guy claimed that at 30 miles, the Iowa could place 9- 16 inch rounds in a 50 yard circle.  Now, as far as I'm concerned, that's a pretty sophisticated analog computer.

[voidmain]

I once visited the battleship North Carolina off the coast of North Carolina. Here it is: http://www.battleshipnc.com/

[ July 03, 2002: Message edited by: VoidMain ]

[Sleeping Dog]

I was going to mention the battleship computers earlier but I refrained.  However, now that you brought it up....The Iowa class battleships had a mechanical computer used for fire control that employed gears, cams and rotating dials to resolve a fire solution.  Many of the older battleships (Including the Tennessee, Alabama and North Carolina) were retro-fitted with this same mechanical computer.

In the battle of Surragao (sp) Straits (Phillipines 1945), an auxillary force of old battleships that had been relegated to pre-invasion duty just "happened" to catch the last vestiages of the Japanese Navy trying to sneak in the back door.  Admiral Oldendorf employed the tactic of "crossing the T" with that fleet of old boats and blew everything except a light cruiser and a destroyer out of the water.  They also had the advantage of what was then called advanced fire control radar used in conjunction with the mechanical fire control computers.  It was also probably the last "battleship against battleship" engagement that the world will ever see.

For the sake of the upcomming holiday I will add this note.....Five of the big boats under Oldendorf's command had previously been sunk or badly damaged at Pearl Harbour.

Talk about sweet revenge......

Sleeping Dog

[Sleeping Dog]

quote:
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
There is still some "argument" as to what was truly the first "computer" as we now think of the word. There was a gay guy who worked for British intelligence during WWII named Turing (sp) who developed a machine for cracking the German Enigma code. The brilliant little queen killed himself a few years later after getting popped on a morals charge by the Bobbies.
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How many geniuses have met a premature tragic end, due to their socially backward society, eh?


Again you are right, Calum, about misunderstood people.  I am not gay and I do not understand the behavior, but the travesty done to Turing, who should have been celebrated as a hero, is rivaled only by the way the US Government treated the principals of the Manhattan project during the McCarthay era.  (Despite the fact that the Rosenbergs were as guilty as sin.)

Witch hunts really only condemn the hunters.

Sleeping Dog

[Master of Reality]

I should really dust off my C64, rewire the disk drive (a loose connection on the switch) and play with it. Then i should find a keyboard for my C128 and play with it too.

[Sleeping Dog]

Yo Bob.......the infancy of gaming included the C-128.

She and I used to lie naked in bed with one of those C-128's on a crisp Sunday morning and try to get out of some cyber issue that we had gotten ourselves into.

She got her degree in programming.  I got the bills from the credit card commpany.

(By the way.....it was worth it!)

I wrote some BASIC stuff that would run on a C-64.  The last programming that I did was a routine that spit everything out to a large spreadsheet plotted on an HP pen plotter.  It informed each tenaant in as rather  large building about their rent obligastions regarding the space that they both occupied and shared.  It was all math and cooked pretty fast.

The funny part was that, at the time, I personally only had a printer that could do 8 1/2 by 11 sheets.  We taped them together and had large (E-sized) sepias run.  We manually cleaned up the sepias, ran blue line copies and distributed them to the client(s).  They paid - we got paid.  (See there....problem solved).

But Damn....that E sized spreadsheet sure looked impressive.

Amazing what you can do when you are poor and need to eat.

Sleeping Dog

[Calum]

this has turned out to be a really interesting thread!

re: the US 1900 census - I am surprised (although i suppose i shouldn't be) to hear of one such as that so early, were IBM responsible? Did they exisdt then? I have a feeling they may have been starting up around that time, and i saw a book once about IBM being hired by the German nazi party in the thirties to provide not only computers, but also technicians so that the nazis could conduct an accurate census (ie so they could easily check out everybody's personal details and kill everybody they didn't like the sound of).
The book was saying that IBM should take responsibility but i reckon that there's nobody at IBM now that was involved, so why worry?

[Sleeping Dog]

I am not really sure when IBM was founded.  I do know that they made mechanical calculators in the 30's and 40's.  During WWII they even produced 30 cal. M1 carbine rifles.  In the early 50's, they produced the first practical electric typewriters.  Those machines put them on the big corporate map even before they got into the computer biz.

I worked for IBM in the early 70's.  Strange company.  On one hand, their R&D was on the bloody edge of technology.....on the other, they released some really stupid (in retrospect)products.

I attended the "roll-out" for the mag-card typewriters.  I was seated at the table with three VP's and the Regional Director of Sales.  After watching the propaganda movie about these new typewriters, the RDS posed the following question to the VP's.

"How do you expect us to go out there and sell these things.  People are going to look at us and laugh.  Then they will tell us that they can go down here to Radio Shack and buy five TRS-80 computers with printers for the money that we are asking for just one of these typewriters.  A TRS-80 will run circles around this thing."

One of the VP's countered with, "You aren't just selling a product....you are selling the IBM reputation for service and support."

The RDS then said "Yeah right.....business people out there are not that gullible.  They are going to tell my salesmen that for the same money we want for a year's service contract on these things, they can afford to throw away three TRS-80's if they break and go buy new ones."

The RDS was prophetically right.  Those machines were in the base line of IBM office products for a shorter time than anything else that they ever built. Not long after that came the Commodores, Atari's, Apples and then the XT in the eighties.  The rest is history.

I began subscribing to the IBM Journal of Research and Development in 1973.  Back then, they were trying to perfect a computing technology called "bubble memory".  Last year I saw a story on Discovery Channel about IBM's "new bubble memory technology" and how it may soon revolutionize computing.  I had to laugh out loud.  Some person or people in the R&D department have made a 30 year career out of bubble memory and it still isn't really "out there" yet.

Cheers and beers...

Sleeping Dog

[creedon]

Back in the mists of my memory (LOTTA fog there, I'm 55), I remember hearing that the ancestor of IBM (the name escapes me) was started because of the success of the 1900 census; I really wish I could remember more detail (that happens fairly often), but I believe that the roots of IBM stretch back to the first decade of the 20TH century.
Regarding "magnetic bubble" memory, I first heard of it around 1975; I worked in the map department of a local county government, and the department next door was the computer department.  I got friendly with one of the programmers, and we'd talk.  Most of the things he talked about were WAY beyond me, but I do remember him talking about this new, revolutionary concept that would change EVERYTHING about computers.  I've mentioned it a few times to various computer people since then, and the reaction was usuall "HUH?, never heard of it."  This is the first time I've ever heard anyone mention it in YEARS, and I had no idea that it was still a viable idea.