How the World's First Computer Was Rescued from the Scrap Heap (2014) • Hacker News Board

Re: How the World's First Computer Was Rescued from the Scrap Heap (2014)

#51

Post by jecel » Wed, Feb 17, 2021, 2:53 AM UTC

kens wrote: post #35

A few thoughts: The historian view is that ENIAC is the "first electronic, general purpose, large scale, digital computer" (with all those adjectives required). The paradoxical thing is that ENIAC is clearly the first in an important way, but it's really hard to nail down how. You really can't overstate the importance of ENIAC: it's the machine that triggered the construction of numerous other computers and started t…

My impression is that having ENIAC running made this event the place to be for anyone interested in computers:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore_School_Lectures

This had a major impact in how computers evolved in the next few years.

Re: How the World's First Computer Was Rescued from the Scrap Heap (2014)

#52

Post by ncmncm » Wed, Feb 17, 2021, 7:02 AM UTC

sep_field wrote: post #41

ncmncm wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GCHQ are embarrassed because they lost / destroyed it. "Refusing" is less embarrassing than "ooopsie!".

do you have a source for this? I imagine you are right, but is there an interesting story about it you've seen?

I recommend "Between Silk and Cyanide" by Leo Marks.

Re: How the World's First Computer Was Rescued from the Scrap Heap (2014)

#53

Post by ncmncm » Wed, Feb 17, 2021, 7:03 AM UTC

twic wrote: post #46

ncmncm wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

3 is not necessary. OSes and linkers are not necessary. We did without for many years. The program should be in some kind of more-or-less addressable memory, to support conditional branching. That's all.

No you didn't. You can't even write a bootloader without 3. All practical computers have always had 3.

You reveal that you have never programmed a microcontroller. Most do not have an OS, and cannot run the compiler used to program them. Yet, they are practical: the world would grind to a stop if they vanished.

Most today are far more powerful than any among the whole first decade of practical computers. Those ran compilers in as little as 4k words of memory. The output of the compiler was not written to memory; it was punched directly to tape or cards. (On some, it physically could not be written to program memory, even if there were room: no bus connected to there.) The tape was later read into program memory--often onto a spinning magnetic drum--and executed directly, no OS in sight.

If you imagine these were not practical computers, consider that people paid $millions for them; they earned their keep. Have you ever operated a computer doing work worth that much?

Re: How the World's First Computer Was Rescued from the Scrap Heap (2014)

#54

Post by usrusr » Wed, Feb 17, 2021, 9:54 AM UTC

retrac wrote: post #42

usrusr wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who knows, perhaps if the minds behind Paperclip had been a little more data-minded: * today, Z3 might be considered "first real" and * today, we might be stuck writing code in a fossilized language lovingly called Plankalkül 58 by its inventors that had so much inertia back then that it stifled all further development in the 1960ies, with the result that all of our 2021 computing would be about as fresh as the 2021…

> we might be stuck writing code in a fossilized language lovingly called Plankalkül 58 by its inventors Substitute ALGOL 58 and that's pretty much what happened. You can't trust those Germans with language design!

Haha, got me, I was just picking any "year used to name a language version" suffix at random, without realizing what corner of computing history this one is associated with. Is there anbody from that era who didn't have their own ALGOL?

Re: How the World's First Computer Was Rescued from the Scrap Heap (2014)

#55

Post by redis_mlc » Thu, Feb 18, 2021, 1:10 AM UTC

ncmncm wrote: post #52

sep_field wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

do you have a source for this? I imagine you are right, but is there an interesting story about it you've seen?

I recommend "Between Silk and Cyanide" by Leo Marks.

I follow WW2, and you'd be surprised that there's several areas of technology that were secret for decades afterward:

- the US submarine torpedo computer (one is restored in SF now)

- Lorenz streaming cipher (I think the Russians continued to use it)

- Britain's entire signals intelligence process was "transferred" to the US, which made a global system still used today.

- and Britain just doesn't declassify anything quickly. Some of the WW2 computer experts tried to get bank loans after the war to start mfg. companies, and I think the bank loan officers called MI5 or MI6 on them. If you follow the MSM, there's a related article or interview annually about this mindset in Britain, where most people expect to go to the grave with any knowledge from the 1940's.

What's interesting about German technology was that:

- Britain didn't know you could do long-range radio navigation until they detected German broadcasts

- the V-1 and V-2 were thought to be fake by Churchill's science advisor until they started landing in Britain, as reliable rockets were "scifi only." The V-2 was a hypersonic ballistic missile that was designed in a Mach 5 wind tunnel, first entered space, then descended at 3600 mph. Even today that sounds like scifi.

Ironically most of the advanced WW2 German technology was leaked in the "Oslo Report", but it was dismissed until horrified British scientists realized it was all true, and it was so far ahead that they couldn't understand it.