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A brief history of computers

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Re: A brief history of computers

#31

Post by sdfgionionio »

>And from what ChatGPT tells me, it's likely that this would have been an investment with a positive ROI.

Wonderful.

It's interesting to me that, in just a few months, I've already developed muscle memory for checking whether or not things I read online are machine-generated. The first thing I do on any website is search for "GPT", "Bing", and "AI" and stop reading if I find them.

Reading someone's writing is an exercise in trust. If they claim something, I have to be able to trust that they have done enough of their homework to back it up. If they cite a source, I have to be able to trust it says what they claim. Otherwise what's the point? If I can't rely on the author, then reading their writing requires checking everything they've said. Their writing is useless to me since I'll need to do my own research anyway.

If you write something and ask me to read it, you are asking me to trust that you have done the legwork. If you really just typed it into ChatGPT, that's more than just stupid. It's a betrayal.

Re: A brief history of computers

#32

Post by chubot »

dboreham wrote: post #17
chubot wrote: post #8

One interesting question (which is very hard to answer) is how many of the ideas were passed down vs. re-invented, and how much theory influenced practice: - I think Mauchly and Eckert (of ENIAC) in the 1940's were unaware of Babbage (1810's) - There was the (in)famous von Neumann paper describing the ENIAC and patent lawsuit - https://www.historyofinformation.com/detail.php?id=639 - this page says that "most likely"…

Most written history is "bunk" in that it's a long-after interpretation of events in the context of what we know today. That's why Turing features heavily -- because he's a colorful character about which many books have been written and movies made that people watch today. But Tommy Flowers is never mentioned. The computer wasn't really invented at all. It evolved from earlier things in a step-wise manner. There were…

Yeah definitely agree, Taleb has warned us about such teleological explanations.

As far as I remember, Woz's biography is good evidence that you don't need the idea of "boolean logic" to design circuits. That did come after the fact -- the way it's taught, not the way it was invented

I think he just said he figured it all out himself essentially, and often did a lot better than the pros. Some of his claims were suspect to me, but I do think his claimed ignorance of prior work is genuine :)

Shannon did come decades earlier though, so the designs of somebody who was influenced by Shannon probably influenced Woz. It's hard to tease apart, but I agree with "evolution" and "tinkering" as the main explanations.

The entertaining explanations are the ones that tend to stick in our minds, but they're not necessarily true

---

The other example I think of is when I look at Debian -- a lot of it is not at all what the Unix inventors had in mind. Debian/Linux basically looked at an artifact and then came up with their own divergent ideas around them

Likewise Woz probably looked at a lot of computers, but he didn't have much of an idea what the creators were thinking -- just the artifacts themselves

Re: A brief history of computers

#34

Post by jchw »

> But the biggest thing is probably that it made assemblers and compilers possible. Well, I'm not sure if that's strictly true. Maybe you could still have them without a shared memory architecture. But the shared memory architecture made them a whole lot easier.

I think the actual important part is being able to address and manipulate code like it's data somehow, rather than the specific architecture. Having two separate address spaces for code and data doesn't necessarily prevent that, though it's surely simpler with only one.

Re: A brief history of computers

#35

Post by gerikson »

sdfgionionio wrote: post #31

>And from what ChatGPT tells me, it's likely that this would have been an investment with a positive ROI. Wonderful. It's interesting to me that, in just a few months, I've already developed muscle memory for checking whether or not things I read online are machine-generated. The first thing I do on any website is search for "GPT", "Bing", and "AI" and stop reading if I find them. Reading someone's writing is an exer…

At least this author states openly that they used ChatGPT. In a couple of months such honesty will be rare.

Re: A brief history of computers

#36

Post by kens »

kitd wrote: post #9
retrac wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In terms of causes and forces, the influence of telecommunication on computing is really hard to overstate. In the Internet era, I think some might be unaware that telecommunication definitively came first, and in my view, effectively led directly to computers. From the electrical engineering perspective, the earliest relay and vacuum tube computers were built out of elements developed for radio and telephone exchang…

From the electrical engineering perspective, the earliest relay and vacuum tube computers were built out of elements developed for radio and telephone exchanges. Indeed. A "main frame" was originally the housing used for the relay switches in the original telephone exchanges.

I've done a ton of research on this, and "main frame" in the computer sense originated with the IBM 701, which was built from various frames such as the power frame, the storage frame, and the main frame (which performed computation). There is a direct (but complicated) path from this to the modern meaning of "mainframe". The "main distribution frame" in a telephone exchange was unrelated.

Re: A brief history of computers

#37

Post by [deleted] »

kitd wrote: post #9
retrac wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In terms of causes and forces, the influence of telecommunication on computing is really hard to overstate. In the Internet era, I think some might be unaware that telecommunication definitively came first, and in my view, effectively led directly to computers. From the electrical engineering perspective, the earliest relay and vacuum tube computers were built out of elements developed for radio and telephone exchang…

From the electrical engineering perspective, the earliest relay and vacuum tube computers were built out of elements developed for radio and telephone exchanges. Indeed. A "main frame" was originally the housing used for the relay switches in the original telephone exchanges.

[deleted]

Re: A brief history of computers

#38

Post by mjbrusso »

citelao wrote: post #23
raspyberr wrote: post #2

Seems pretty reasonable for someone doing their own high level research. Notably missing any references to telegrams and telephone systems.

What would be a good, more academic overview of computing history? Do you have any specific book recommendations? I'd love to read a more "citation-based" version.

The First Computers

History and Architectures

Edited by Raúl Rojas and Ulf Hashagen

https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262681377/the-first-computers/

Re: A brief history of computers

#39

Post by cfmcdonald »

citelao wrote: post #23
raspyberr wrote: post #2

Seems pretty reasonable for someone doing their own high level research. Notably missing any references to telegrams and telephone systems.

What would be a good, more academic overview of computing history? Do you have any specific book recommendations? I'd love to read a more "citation-based" version.

IMO the best overall "soup to nuts" survey of the history of computers is Campbell-Kelly, et. al., "Computer: A History of the Information Machine."

Specifically on the relation of telecommunications to computers I will toot my own horn and recommend my book, McDonald, "How the Telegraph, Telephone, and Radio Created the Computer."

Re: A brief history of computers

#40

Post by lproven »

dmvdoug wrote: post #15

> I'm confused though. Babbage came up with the blueprints for his Difference Engine in the 1820s. I know he never succeeded at actually building it, but he never really had a fair chance if you ask me. Babbage had a chance to build his difference engine. The problem was that the engineering was a lot harder than he thought it was going to be, and he was a mathematician/economist, not so much a working engineer. The…

A Swedish family, called Scheutz, finished the Difference Engine within a few years after Babbage gave up, and sold them very profitably for many decades.

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

It wasn't too hard for the time... Babbage just kept getting distracted.

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