wrote:
From: on Sun, Oct 8 2006 5:29 am
wrote:
From: on Sat, Oct 7 2006 6:39 am
Ever hear of 'the BSTJ?' That's the Bell System Technical
Journal. Before the Bell break-up it was published
(mostly) monthly. They had a nice write-up in it on the
three electromechanical 'computers' that Bell Labs made
for making Firing Tables during WWII.
They were slow - at least an order of magnitude slower than ENIAC. They
were not general purpose, either. Their technology led nowhere.
Tell that to Bell Labs. :-) Tell that to Claude
Elwood Shannon. :-)
I don't have to - the Army already did:
Quoting Chapter 1 of "ELECTRONIC COMPUTERS WITHIN THE ORDNANCE CORPS"
(an official US Army history):
"Two Bell Relay Computers were used. They were accurate, but slow and
required expert maintenance. Dust and humidity adversely affected their
operation."
The point is that the ENIAC folks got the machine to work with the
parts available.
The Army accepted ENIAC, moved it to the Aberdeen Proving Grounds, and
used it until 1955.
If it were not a 'practical' device, they would have simply abandoned
it or scrapped it.
Mechanical and electromechanical computing and calculating were
rendered hopelessly obsolete by ENIAC's success. ENIAC caused the focus
to move to purely electronic computing and calculating. Within a few
years, commercial machines like UNIVAC were on the market. (A UNIVAC
correctly predicted the outcome of the 1952 presidential election,
based on just a few percent of the returns).
Predicted all by itself? No programmer did anything?
Amazing!
But, UNIVAC was not ENIAC. :-)
It's clear you're very jealous, Len.
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Yawn.
Those machines can all trace their design right back to ENIAC - and not
to any mechanical or electromechanical device.
Oh, my, not to Alfred Boole? :-)
Nope.
Not to Von Neuman?
Do you mean John von Neumann? He was on the team that built ENIAC.
Not to hundreds of thousands
like Bardeen, Brattain, and Shockley?
They invented the transistor, not the computer, Len.
Right you are, Mr. Computer Guru. Nothing about "Harvard"
architecture,
Von Neumann architecture is the key.
"pipelining",
ENIAC could do parallel computations.
bilateral digital switching,
standardized logic levels,
ENIAC's were standardized.
RAM,
ENIAC had accumulators - aka registers.
ROM, EPROM,
Had those, too.
or BINARY
registers instead of the BCD variant ENIAC used.
ENIAC was a decimal machine. Not BCD.
Modern
computers "trace their design right back to ENIAC?"
Nooooooo.
Yes, they do.
At least the US Army thinks so:
http://ftp.arl.army.mil/ftp/historic...-comp-tree.gif
The root of the tree is ENIAC.
Some quotes from Army history:
"During the period 1946 - 1955 the ENIAC was operated successfully for
a total of 80,223 hours of operation. It performed about five thousand
arithmetic operations for each second of its useful life. ENIAC led the
computer field through 1952 when it served as the main computation
machine for the solution of the scientific problems of the nation. It
surpassed all other existing computers in solving problems involving a
large number of arithmetic operations. It was the major instrument for
the computation of all ballistic tables for the U.S. Army and Air
Force. In addition to ballistics, the ENIAC's field of application
included weather prediction, atomic energy calculations, cosmic ray
studies, thermal ignition, random number studies, wind tunnel design,
and other scientific uses."
Try as hard as I can, I can't find ANY relatively modern
computer that needs 6SN7s (a dual triode, octal base),
not even 12AU7s.
You didn't look very hard:
http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,10...1/article.html
The last vacuum tube used with computers
was the CRT and that's quickly going away...
So what? It's only been 60 years since ENIAC was announced...