Unfortunately, if the subject doesn't have "AI", no one cares.
It's wild that in 100 years we went from room sized calculators to AGSI capable of destroying the planet.
next 20 years ;)
Eniac, the First General-Purpose Digital Computer, Turns 80
51–60 of 64 posts
Re: Eniac, the First General-Purpose Digital Computer, Turns 80
#52ENIAC was very important but this article overstates its significance and ignores other (non US) machines to the point of historical inaccuracy. No mention of Z3 or Manchester Baby for example, the latter based on the von Neumann paper for example, was arguably a more accurate pointer towards how computer architecture would develop.
ENIAC was far more important for the general computing industry than other machines of its time. ENIAC led to EMCC (the first computer company) and UNIVAC. It was UNIVAC and IBM struggling against one another that created the entire industry.
The publication of the von Neumann report has been many orders of magnitude more important for the computing industry than ENIAC.
Soon after that publication, many teams in many places and in several countries have started designing computers and a lot of research results have been published by them, which has lead to the establishment of the computer industry.
The first computer company was a flop, they got lucky that they were bought eventually, otherwise they would not have been able to deliver a useful product. UNIVAC was indeed the first important commercial computer (not the first commercial computer). Nevertheless, UNIVAC was mostly already obsolete at the time of its introduction, due to the use of the delay line memories, for which better alternatives were known. UNIVAC did have a technical first nonetheless, it was the first to use magnetic tapes. However soon the competition (i.e. IBM) made more reliable and also cheaper magnetic tape units.
In USA, UNIVAC had the advantage of being the first on the market, but the IBM computers that followed shortly were more innovative, so IBM deserved becoming the leader of the market instead of UNIVAC. Moreover, IBM was more open at that time and they published a lot of useful technical information about their computers, which contributed to the advancement of the entire computing industry.
The ENIAC team and their successors had a quite minor contribution to the early years of the US computing industry, in comparison with research centers like IAS, universities like MIT, government agencies like NBS (the predecessor of NIST) or companies like IBM, ATT and a few others, all of which introduced essential innovations in computers and they also published the results of their work, enabling the reuse by others.
Re: Eniac, the First General-Purpose Digital Computer, Turns 80
#53Earlier quoted context omitted.
ENIAC was far more important for the general computing industry than other machines of its time. ENIAC led to EMCC (the first computer company) and UNIVAC. It was UNIVAC and IBM struggling against one another that created the entire industry.
IBM built the Harvard Mark 1 in 1944, before EMCC existed.
Then IBM also built the hybrid electronic-electromechanical IBM SSEC computer (operational from January 1948), which was a truly general-purpose digital computer, which was available before any fully-electronic computer and for a few years it was the most powerful computer of the world and it solved many important problems.
While ENIAC, being completely electronic, remained faster than SSEC for a few problems, most problems could not be solved at all on ENIAC, because it had no big-capacity memory, so for most computing problems SSEC was the best choice until the completion of the first electronic computers with memories based either on cathode-ray tubes or on delay lines or on magnetic drums.
IBM SSEC was available as a public computing service, so it was used by many companies and institutions. Besides SSEC, before the first electronic computers there were a few others electromechanical computers, e.g. at Bell Labs or at Harvard, but those were slower and had fewer users.
Re: Eniac, the First General-Purpose Digital Computer, Turns 80
#54ENIAC was very important but this article overstates its significance and ignores other (non US) machines to the point of historical inaccuracy. No mention of Z3 or Manchester Baby for example, the latter based on the von Neumann paper for example, was arguably a more accurate pointer towards how computer architecture would develop.
Wait, where are you thinking the von Neumann paper which came from?
The von Neumann report was written after von Neumann had several discussions with the ENIAC team about how to make a better computer as a successor for ENIAC.
The report was not published formally, but it was "leaked", so it does not have any credits for the ideas contained in it.
Because of this, with few exceptions it is impossible to determine with certainty which parts of the report are original ideas of von Neumann and which parts are ideas that von Neumann might have learned during the discussions with the ENIAC team.
An example of an idea that certainly did not come from the ENIAC team was the proposal to use an iconoscope CRT as the main memory (which was implemented first in the British Manchester computers, so such a memory became known as a Williams-Kilburn tube). The ENIAC team had a different idea of what to use as a memory, i.e. delay lines taken from radars. Von Neumann replaced this suggestion with a CRT, because he thought that a random-access memory is better.
The von Neumann report had an exceptional importance because it defined with perfect clarity what a digital computer should be, which should be its structure and then provided a detailed description of how such a computer should be designed, which was good enough to enable anyone who read the report to build such a computer. This effect really happened, and a great number of teams at universities, government agencies, independent research centers like IAS and various companies, both in USA and in other countries, have built electronic computers in the following decade, exploring various design options.
There is no doubt that the clarity of the report is due to von Neumann and whichever were the ideas of the ENIAC team about a future computer, they were much more jumbled.
Because the ENIAC team did not publish their ideas (and they did not intend to, because they already wanted to monetize what they had learned about computers, by founding a private company), it does not really matter what they thought. The world has learned how to make general-purpose electronic computers from the von Neumann report.
ENIAC was a programmable computing automaton, but it was not a digital computer in the modern sense of the word, i.e. a digital system with 4 levels of closed positive-feedback loops (the complexity of a digital system is determined by the number of levels of nested positive-feedback loops, combinational logic has 0 levels, a memory has 1 level, an automaton has 2 levels, a processor has 3 levels and a computer has 4 levels; these are minimum numbers, as a real device may have more levels than strictly necessary, to achieve various advantages).
Re: Eniac, the First General-Purpose Digital Computer, Turns 80
#55ENIAC is where the profession of programming was born — and the first programmers were six women: Kay McNulty, Betty Jennings, Betty Snyder, Marlyn Meltzer, Frances Bilas, and Ruth Lichterman. They had to program it by physically rewiring patch cables and flipping switches. There was no programming language, no stored program. The "software" was the hardware configuration itself. It took another decade before FORTRAN…
Even in the 1950s, my mother worked on a machine that could be programmed in octal, but you could change the instruction set with patch cables.
Perhaps one of the IBM 60x programmable calculator series, which were widely used.
Re: Eniac, the First General-Purpose Digital Computer, Turns 80
#56ENIAC is where the profession of programming was born — and the first programmers were six women: Kay McNulty, Betty Jennings, Betty Snyder, Marlyn Meltzer, Frances Bilas, and Ruth Lichterman. They had to program it by physically rewiring patch cables and flipping switches. There was no programming language, no stored program. The "software" was the hardware configuration itself. It took another decade before FORTRAN…
There were programmers before that, e.g. for the IBM ASCC at Harvard, which was based on the ideas of Howard Aiken (inspired by Babbage).
Programming the IBM ASCC (a.k.a. Harvard Mark I) was much closer to the programming a modern computer in comparison with ENIAC, as it had an instruction set and programmers wrote a sequence of instructions on punched tapes. However even ASCC had some panels where it was possible to rewire some of the execution units to change their behavior, i.e. to change what some of the instructions from the instruction set did, but that was not the primary means for programming the computer. In ASCC the rewiring was akin to the microprogramming available in some later electronic computers, where you could change what some instructions did or you could add custom instructions.
Among the programmers of the IBM ASCC, Grace Hopper became later famous due to her contributions to the first high-level programming languages.
Therefore the profession of programmer has not started with ENIAC, even if the ENIAC programmers were among the first programmers.
Re: Eniac, the First General-Purpose Digital Computer, Turns 80
#57ENIAC is where the profession of programming was born — and the first programmers were six women: Kay McNulty, Betty Jennings, Betty Snyder, Marlyn Meltzer, Frances Bilas, and Ruth Lichterman. They had to program it by physically rewiring patch cables and flipping switches. There was no programming language, no stored program. The "software" was the hardware configuration itself. It took another decade before FORTRAN…
Thank you for highlighting the contributions of women in computing, especially at it's inception! That is so easily forgotten or intentionally ignored in the age of the "tech bro"
There were other programmers before those of ENIAC, but they also included women, like Grace Hopper, who later had an important role in the development of programming languages.
Re: Eniac, the First General-Purpose Digital Computer, Turns 80
#58ENIAC is where the profession of programming was born — and the first programmers were six women: Kay McNulty, Betty Jennings, Betty Snyder, Marlyn Meltzer, Frances Bilas, and Ruth Lichterman. They had to program it by physically rewiring patch cables and flipping switches. There was no programming language, no stored program. The "software" was the hardware configuration itself. It took another decade before FORTRAN…
There were programmers before that, e.g. for the IBM ASCC at Harvard, which was based on the ideas of Howard Aiken (inspired by Babbage). Programming the IBM ASCC (a.k.a. Harvard Mark I) was much closer to the programming a modern computer in comparison with ENIAC, as it had an instruction set and programmers wrote a sequence of instructions on punched tapes. However even ASCC had some panels where it was possible to…
[dead]
Re: Eniac, the First General-Purpose Digital Computer, Turns 80
#59ENIAC is where the profession of programming was born — and the first programmers were six women: Kay McNulty, Betty Jennings, Betty Snyder, Marlyn Meltzer, Frances Bilas, and Ruth Lichterman. They had to program it by physically rewiring patch cables and flipping switches. There was no programming language, no stored program. The "software" was the hardware configuration itself. It took another decade before FORTRAN…
Thank you for highlighting the contributions of women in computing, especially at it's inception! That is so easily forgotten or intentionally ignored in the age of the "tech bro"
The ENIAC women's story is especially striking because they were classified as "sub-professional".
The hardware was the prestigious work, the programming was considered clerical.
That framing took decades to reverse.
Re: Eniac, the First General-Purpose Digital Computer, Turns 80
#60ENIAC is where the profession of programming was born — and the first programmers were six women: Kay McNulty, Betty Jennings, Betty Snyder, Marlyn Meltzer, Frances Bilas, and Ruth Lichterman. They had to program it by physically rewiring patch cables and flipping switches. There was no programming language, no stored program. The "software" was the hardware configuration itself. It took another decade before FORTRAN…
Even in the 1950s, my mother worked on a machine that could be programmed in octal, but you could change the instruction set with patch cables.
That's a fascinating detail! Do you know which machine?
The transition period where patch cables and stored programs coexisted is one of the most interesting eras in computing history.