Posted on 06/21/2018 12:13:42 PM PDT by Swordmaker
Seventy years ago was arguably the start of the modern computer age.
A machine that took up an entire room at a laboratory in Manchester University ran its first programme at 11am on 21 June 1948.
The prototype completed the task in 52 minutes, having run through 3.5 million calculations.
The Manchester Baby, known formally as the Small-Scale Experimental Machine, was the world's first stored-program computer.
It paved the way for the first commercially-available computers in a city known for centuries of science and innovation.
(Excerpt) Read more at bbc.com ...
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Happy Birthday Skynet!
I don’t know when it was but I once read that the Carl Zeiss Company was one of the first purchasers of the Univac Computer.
Before that, they would hire a large number of math teachers to do the complex calculations necessary for lens design.
One of my favorite books is “Surely You’re Joking Mr. Feynman”, and in it Richard Feynman talks about how they did the calculations for the Atomic Bomb...rooms of teams of people with colored index cards that they would perform various things, stack them in a certain order, another team would pick them up, bring them to another room, and people would do more calculations.
I found it fascinating...
I used to be a whiz at math but as I get older, I get worser and worser.
I recently found a new TI calculator on clearance, marked down from $140 to $30. I think it is a TI Inspire CX. Anyway, after taking it out, playing with it and reading a few instructions online, I have no idea of how to use it.
I will probably give it to my Son-in-Law.
Imagine what those Atomic Scientists would have done with it.
Did age have any effect on your grammar?
And it sounded better because it used tubes!
“Computer” was once a job title. For people.
Time flies - daughter bought me a 2 TB outboard hard drive for backup storage for Father’s Day - I can remember when having 32K of working storage on a Radio Shack computer was a real luxury.....
I think they said at the time "who will ever need a full meg?"
Oddly enough, my grammatical ability seems to be getting a little better. It was always my weakest area.
Still, insulting my grammar is something up with which I will not put.
Wow! No kidding!
LOL, I’m not a grammar nazi.
rlmorel wrote: “One of my favorite books is “Surely You’re Joking Mr. Feynman”, and in it Richard Feynman talks about how they did the calculations for the Atomic Bomb...rooms of teams of people with colored index cards that they would perform various things, stack them in a certain order, another team would pick them up, bring them to another room, and people would do more calculations.”
Each process step involved probability distributions. The process was called “Monte Carlo”. I’ve read that this term was actually classified for some time.
What about UNIVAC (Roman numeral) I at the University of Pennsylvania that same year ???
We used UNIVAC II in the USAF in 1971...
Most interesting...heh, “Monte Carlo”! I am going to look that up, thanks for the tip!
My brother had an Altair 8800. You would program it by toggling the switches on the front panel.
It may still be at my folks house, but it got dropped at some point and is heavily damaged, so no more collector value.
The only person I know that said that regularly was my 7th grade math teacher who looked like an Alfred Hitchcock knockoff. It was funny to see that phrase on a thread about math. :)
A 2016 book claims ENIAC was first in April 1948 with a Monte Carlo simulation. Not the type of thing they would issue a press release for.
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