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Technology Books Media Book Reviews

ENIAC, the forgotten story 181

Posted by JonKatz from the Prophets-Without-Honor dept.
Scott McCartney's Eniac is a beautifully researched, immensely readable, and surprisingly poignant look at the two men who worked for three years in the frenzied atmosphere of World War II to successfully build Eniac, the world's first digital, electronic computer.

One of the most amazing things about their very overdue story is that most of us have never heard of either of them.

ENIAC: The Triumphs and Tragedies of The World's First Computer
author Scott McCartney of the Wall Street Journal
pages 262
publisher Walker
rating 8/10
reviewer Jon Katz
ISBN
summary The forgotten men who built the world's first computer

Quiz:

Who invented the telephone?

The electric light bulb?

Launched the first manned flight?

We all know, of course. We've been schooled from the age of five to know. The creators of some of the greatest American technology are legends, household words, patriotic icons and shamans, their homes and labs turned into historic landmarks and museums.

But who built the first electronic computer?

A group of sixth-grade New Jersey students, asked that question earlier this year, divided their responses between Bill Gates and Steve Jobs. A nine-year-old Virginia student guessed, "Radio Shack."

The fact that most people - even on a website like this - have no idea of the answer is why Scott McCartney's "ENIAC: " "the Triumphs and Tragedies of the World's First Computer" is such a smart and timely book. Talk about prophets without honor.

Computing hit like the Big Bang. The International Data Corporation (IDC) estimates the amount of commerce conducted over the World Wide Web will top $1 trillion by 2003. Yet the Net's history is murky. The people who profit from modern computers are well known, but the people who actually developed them are forgotten.

Last week, as the Internet celebrated its 30th birthday, a scientist present at the UCLA lab (the first node of ARPAnet was installed at the UCLA Network Measurement Center, where a research group connected the IMP to their Sigma 7) where it was partially created told a reporter that nobody even bothered to take a picture.

Scott McCartney, a staff writer for the Wall Street Journal, decided to remedy that sad reality. His book tells the virtually unknown story of two scientists, the late John Mauchly and Presper Eckert, and their tenacious three-year struggle to build the legendary ENIAC in a secret workshop at the University of Pennsylvania. Mauchly and Eckert are rarely written about in computer anthologies and histories, not even mentioned in Stephen Segaller's otherwise thorough "Nerds 2.0.l, A Brief History Of The Internet" published last year. A plaque at the University of Pennsylvania commemorates the spot where ENIAC was put together, but doesn't even list the names of its inventors.

Mauchly and Eckert were obsessed with the idea of using electricity to make computing machines "think." Ridiculed and ignored by their colleagues, they found unlikely benefactors in the U.S. Army, desperate to find some way to calculate artillery shell trajectories as the Allies were getting chopped to bits attacking entrenched German positions in Italy and World War II.

Despite the fact we more or less know how it turns out, "ENIAC" is a scientific thriller, with McCartney skillfully and knowledgeably tracing the assembling of this unprecedented machine, with its countless vacuum tubes, cables and gears.

Although ENIAC was commissioned at the beginning of the War, Mauchly and Eckert didn't finish it until the fall of 1945, as peace descended. It had taken 200,000 man-hours of work and cost $486,804.22. What the Army got for its money was a thirty-ton monster that filled 1,800 square feet - the size of a three-bedroom apartment in many cities. What the rest of us got was modern computing, the Net and the World Wide Web.

ENIAC had forty different units, including twenty accumulators, arranged in the shape of a U, all connected by a ganglion of heavy black cable as thick as fire hose. It was 1,000 times faster than any numerical calculator, 500 times faster than any existing computing machine. In thirty seconds, ENIAC could calculate a trajectory, something that would require twenty hours with a desk calculator, or fifteen minutes on the machine then called the Differential Analyzer. Today's supercomputers, ENIAC's descendants, can perform the same task in three microseconds.

In the wrong hands, this would be a potentially Byzantine and impenetrable tale, but McCartney presents it with the perfect blend of skill, clarity, and most remarkably, humanity. He never forgets, or lets us readers forget, that like any story about technology, this is really a story about human beings. Mauchly and Eckert are well-drawn, fully developed characters in this powerful but ultimately sad, story.

Although the pair worked brilliantly together to build ENIAC, in the aftermath, their relationship, their work and their personal lives all suffered. Beset by back-stabbing, academic and legal intrigues, their own great naivete, and by financial and private setbacks, they were outflanked and financially outmaneuvered by other scientists, and by IBM and other emerging firms. Although they belatedly filed a patent on ENIAC, they spent much of the rest of their lives unsucessfully defending their invention against legions of claimants and competitors.

Worse, they have been almost universally forgotten by the astonishing subculture they made possible - at least, until now.

"ENIAC" is a not only a compelling and entertaining read, but offers the added satisfaction of helping right one of the more egregious oversights of the Information Age.

Purchase this book at Amazon.
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ENIAC, the forgotten story More

ENIAC, the forgotten story

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  • Re:You're all wrong. (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    The actual first digital computer was built at Iowa State University in 1939. It's known as the ABC, and was certified in federal court as being the first electronic digital computer, predating the ENIAC. Read about it at http://www.scl.ameslab.gov/ABC/ or in the fine book Atanasoff, Forgotten Father of the Computer, by Clark R. Mollenhoff.

  • I knew who Eckert and Mauchly were! (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Katz, anyone who has seen the PBS series "Triumph of the Nerds" or "The Incredible Machine" and who didn't fall asleep during, knew that Eckert and Mauchly created ENIAC. You're posting this article on the site for nerds, and claiming that none of us knows who they are? Some of us know our computing history, at least...

  • Foreigners don't count (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Imagine a discussion about animal intelligence - most people would happily assert humans come out top. This would seem laughable to an alien monitoring the discussion from a neighbouring galaxy. Katz is like this with non-americans. I imagine he believes that his examples (telephone, light-bulb, flight) were first invented by Americans or at the very least in America. From earlier articles I got the idea he believes various other things (free speech, democracy, individual rights, the web) are also American inventions. It's not that he's bigoted - its just that he only has the vaguest sense that anything exists outside of America. It's a common fault. The main reason for this is that America is a very large country so you can happily forget about the rest of the world. Europeans would probably be like this too, except that we can barely drive 100 miles without ending up in another country which makes the rest of the world harder to forget about. I also believe that part of the problem comes from a subtle form of propoganda which was necessary during the cold war. Americans had to believe that America == good, anti-American == bad otherwise they would have not had the moral fervour necessary to defeat communism. The worrying thing is, Russians are aware that they were fed a biased form of history for decades, but Americans have no sense of this. Americans really believe they were fed the truth, while everyone else was being lied to. No, we've all been lied to.

  • Update (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I should have done research before I posted these guesses. The Nazis did not fund Zuse's work. After building the Z1, he was unable to convince the Nazi government to support his work. He recieved funding from friends. "During the last days of war the next model Z4 was transported under adventurous circumstances via truck and horse-drawn cart from Berlin to Göttingen and then to the Allgäu. Hidden in a stable it remained undiscovered by the war parties and was later in 1949 transported to the Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule Zürich." Since Zuse kept his computer hidden after the war, it became commonly accepted that the ENIAC was the first computer.

  • Women of Eniac (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Speaking of recognition, this audience may also be interested to ponder that in the days of Eniac, "software" as we now know it, was not recognized as a part of the invention. The people responsible for coding the obtuse beast in binary were staff of the army computing center where they had previously performed trajectory calculations by hand. Since the men were mostly at war, this office capitalized on the labor of top women in mathematics who were eventually called on to work on programming the Eniac. The pictures we often see of the Eniac in action, showing women walking around it in lab coats were no Vanna Whites but some of Americas first software engineers as we now know them. That's as best as I remember the details anyway. If you belong to the IEEE Computing Society, you can read the full article here: http://computer.org/annals/an1996/a3 013abs.htm [computer.org]

  • Another interesting book... (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    If you're at all interested in computer pre-history, you might be interested in
    "From Dits to Bits." It's an autobiographical
    account of the author's involvement with ENIAC
    and the first UNIVAC machines.

    From Dits to Bits: A Personal History of the
    Electronic Computer
    Herman Lukoff
  • As someone who is a geek and very interested in computer history, I can tell you from first hand experience that most computer science people, even those of us who have the love for the discipline, don't know anything about the beginnings of the industry. The computer industry and culture is one of the most interesting and varied that there has ever been and it's a shame that nobody knows about it. I think a class on the History of Computing should be mandatory for all CS students and recomended for everybody else.
    I had the opprotunity to "teach" an Academic Decathlon team from my old high school about computer industry jargon and the thing most of them wanted when I was finished was more stories about the industry. Most non-geeks/nerds think computer history would be boring but that's before they hear about it. If you're interested, I'd recommend the following books and movies, please reply to this message with more if you have some ideas.

    Triumph of the Nerds video
    Accidental Empires book that TotN was based on by Robert X. Cringley
    Hackers by Steven Levy
    Nerds 2.0 video and book

  • Who invented the telephone? The electric light bulb? Launched the first manned flight?
    We all know, of course. We've been schooled from the age of five to know. The creators of some of the greatest American technology are legends, household words, patriotic icons and shamans, their homes and labs turned into historic landmarks and museums.

    What a bletcherous load of crap! What is it with American's that you simply cannot accept that you are not the greatest technological nation in the world?

    The Telephone was invented by a Scotsman, the electric lightbulb was co-invented by another Scotsman, the first manned flight was most probably made by some lunatic Chinaman strapped to a kite centuries before The Good Ol' US of A had even been thought of. The first heavier-than-air flight was not necessarily made by the Wright brothers, there is significant evidence to support the idea that there was a man (who's name escapes me currently) in New Zealand who made the first aeroplane flight.

  • The systems laid down by Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace were as smart if not smarter than ENIAC. Except he got there 100 years before everyone else so I guess that excludes him. And of course we should never forget that the first computer programmer was a woman...

    For the true story on the first electronic computer (i.e. one that has the same basic building blocks as the one you are sitting in front off) see http://www.computer50.org/
  • The book has at least one essential flaw. The first working, fully programmable general purpose computer was Konrad Zuse's Z3 (Germany, 1941).

    The Z3 was not fully programmable: Zuse forgot about the Jump and If-then-else instructions. No loops possible, oops. If you wanted the Z3 to do lots of calculations, you had to feed it a long program on punched tape :-) A German description of the Z3's architecture is here [uni-halle.de].

    The first fully programmable computer was Babbage's analytic engine [fourmilab.ch]. Steam power rules! Of course, it was never built. Vaporware rules twice! By the way, his GF Ada Lovelace invented the loop. Chicks rule thrice!

    The first operational fully programmable computer was ENIAC (you programmed it by replugging cables). Colossus was a secret special purpose cracking machine for the German Lorenz code and hat limited programmability.

    --

  • The analytical engine [fourmilab.ch] was never built. Babbage's difference engine, a much more primitive special purpose machine, was built several times, even during his lifetime.

    --

  • Is a cute little tome I stumbled across at my local library: From Dits to Bits.
    Don't recall the author's name, but IIRC he was *there*.
    The title refers to morse code (dits) and, obviously, computer's bits, and the book follows the concept of information encoding, through eniac, and chronicles the first attempts at the realisation of a commercial computing system. Fascinating read. These guys had at it like cavemen fashioning a 747 with flint axes. They had to create all their tools from scratch, and hand-over-hand their way up the ladder of creation. Don't know if it's still in print, but it deserves a place right up there w/ Mythical Man Month and Soul of a New Machine.
    GREAT book!
  • Uh oh..
    Didn't see your post first time round. I mention it again further down. It's a must-read, however. Thanks for reminding me of the name of the author.
  • MAN! That is SO COOL! Let's port linux to it!
  • The post is the output of a gibberish generation program. A good one, but probably not totally autonomous. This crap has been seen here before.
  • On the flight topic, Being an american I have to bring up the Wrights. I'm not saying that they were first, but the american public school system seems to think so. Is there any proof? Anything I could look at while Im at work, for instance?

  • Our computers are just finite state machines. They have many states (2**number_of_bits ), but they don't have infinite tape (as Turing machine).

    Well, the tape is not infinite, but can be extended when needed. :-)

    However, the main point of Universal TM was that it could take a coded description of any TM (i.e. a program) and run it. So a UTM could simulate any TM in "software".

    ...richie

  • I thought they were Von Neumann machines?

    AFAIK, Von Neumann designed what this today's typical computer architecture. You know, one CPU, some memory for storage. Data has to move from memory to the CPU for processing etc...

    Was he also the one who realized that programs are just another kind of data that can be stored in memory?

    ...richie

  • Beowulf cluster!!!

    (someone had to say it...)
  • Whoah, dude. Talk about serious paranoia... and poor thinking.

    Seems like most of the real conspiracy nuts have a very unclear grasp of the difference between correlation and causation.

    Arthur C. Clarke, for example, may have had friends that were Masons. He may even have been a Mason himself; I don't know. And, 3001 was published after his death. These are both true, but this is just a correlation. Except for the timing problems, it would be equally valid to say that the publication of 3001 caused his friends to be members in the Masons. Correlation does not imply causation.

    Arthur Clarke, btw, was considered one of the Big Three of the first wave of science fiction writers. Simple demand would have resulted in the publication of anything remaining after his death. It is very weak thinking to claim that its publication was a Masonic plot, when it is entirely obvious that simple fame suffices as an explanation.

    And your subtext that 'Masons are evil' is silly. My father was a Mason, and I can assure you he neither worshiped Satan nor rode in black helicopters. He eventually got a bit disgusted with them -- it is something of an old-boys' club that has gotten away from its root causes, preventing another Inquisition and serving those in need -- but your fear is based on assertions by the same organization that CAUSED the Inquisition.

    Given the overall credibility levels of the two organizations, who are you going to believe? Personally, I'll bet on the anti-Inquisition side. :-)

  • Anyone who criticizes the Masons in any way (recall that the original posters main complaint was that the Masons promote books by their fellow Masons and that Jon Katz apparantly had Masonic sympathies) must necessarily be ...

    Okay, let's go back and look at the original wording of the complaint.

    I don't know for sure you or the author are Masons , but your Masonic sympathies have become quite clear in your past posts on here with catch phrases urging us to support the "New World Order"

    Okay, first the author admits that he doesn't know that Katz is a Mason, but then asserts that he has Masonic sympathies. He knows this because Katz has used the phrase "New World Order" at least once in his life. Oooh, that's a really strong justification. I'm convinced. Oh my god, I typed New World Order, I must be in on it. Fnord.

    I'm particularily upset with Arthur C. Clark's published book 3001, which we had published after his death through his will to satisfy his Masonic friends, many of whom apparantly helped push his career.

    The 'we' here is interesting. I assume this AC works for whoever published 3001. He claims 'to satisfy his Masonic friends', implying that being Masons is THE MOST IMPORTANT thing about them. It's exactly the same as saying, 'to satisfy his Catholic friends' or 'his Baptist friends'. There's no reason to include the extra info unless it is important, and in this context can only be taken to imply that they had it published BECAUSE they are Masons... not because they are his friends. He also completely ignores the fact that fan demand would probably have gotten the book published anyway, as Clarke was a very popular author. (I didn't like him that much myself. There were a lot of 'lesser lights' that I much preferred. Clarke was too gloomy.)

    ANYway.. here's a nice bit of paranoia:

    This book contained all sorts of anti-Christain ramblings (one or two chapters were little more than a direct attack on Christainity.) Clarke probably promised this book to his Masonic friends who, in exchanged, promoted his earlier works.

    The author is asserting that Clarke wrote anti-Christian texts in exchange for favors. Wow. In other words, Clarke didn't just believe that Christianity was bad for humanity and write about it. No, it had to be some bargain to promote the Masonic agenda. The simple explanation won't suffice -- it must be complex.

    And, as another poster pointed out, this is the site for nerds; many of us know this stuff! I would much rather purchase a computing history textbook from someone who wasn't a Mason; this way, I wouldn't someday find my money used in some sort of subversive attack on Western Civilization. Just my $0.02.

    So now we've gone from being Masonic to plotting the demise of Western Civilization. (see above for one alleged plot.) I'm sorry, but A does not lead to B. I absolutely know of at least one exception, and no, it does not prove the rule.

    Okay, re: black helicopters and Satan and all that... admittedly, our AC did not mention those. I am indeed guilty of a presumption. I have argued a number of times with a number of people on this particular subject, and every single time I run into someone who is into Masons and their 'evil plots', it ends up in Illuminati and Satan. I baselessly projected that into the discussion before it arrived by itself.

    However, you misstate me badly in the last bullet point. I don't presume that this AC wants to burn people at the stake. I'm sure that's the last thing he wants to do. He is, however, attacking an organization whose principal purpose is preventing another such horror from happening. My implication is that it is a bit unwise to take the word of organizations that HAVE tortured and killed about organizations that probably have not and are opposed to first's torture.

    Now, are the Masons actually up to something? It's possible. Fraternities, as someone else was commenting here, do tend to look out for their own, and the Masons have been around a long time. I'm sure there's more than a few rotten apples in a barrel that big. However, from an individual standpoint, continuing the status quo is likely to be the most lucrative and beneficial course. What would they have to gain from attacking Western Civilization? They sure stand to lose an awful lot.... they have a lot of wealth and power in the current system.

    The only answers I have gotten to that question have, so far, been frenzied frothing about bargains with Lucifer, the 33rd degree, Satanic rites and blood sacrifice. Usually with black helicopters, New World Orders, and conspiracies so deep and dark that they span hundreds of years, continents, and cultures, yet somehow have remained mostly secret.

    Sorry, I don't buy those. If our AC can come up with a better reason, or if you can, please go ahead. You certainly can't do much worse than the answers I got before. :-) Conspiracies are like murders -- to hang together, they have to have a means, a method, and a motive/payoff. The bigger the conspiracy is, the larger the payoff needs to be to maintain it.

    I submit that fear of torture and persecution is a strong enough motive to hold an organization together for hundreds of years, and that intent to conspire simply is not strong enough a motivation no matter WHAT the potential payoff is. I haven't heard many other plausible reasons to hold together an organization whose intent is the demise of Western Civilization. Remember, that same organization was instrumental in building a good chunk of it, and its existence predates Western Civilization by quite some time.

    Sorry, it just doesn't hang together.

  • Caveat: I didn't read 3001. I read the first chapter in a preview -- it sounded hopelessly dull.

    But what angers me the most about the poster I'm responding to is his talk about `anti-inquisition forces'. I read 3001. The book was not only anti-Christian, anti-Jewish, anti-Islamic, anti-anything to do with religion (check out the amazon reviews!).

    I wasn't saying Clarke is anti-inquisition, although I'm sure he would have to be. He obviously feared religion a good deal, and there are vast, vast reams of data to support his view. However, religion certainly isn't the only source of evil in the world: government has done its fair share.

    I think most Western religions encourage one not to think and seek answers for oneself, but to blindly accept canned answers. That is dangerous. Nazi Germany did the same thing. It's dangerous no matter who uses it. Telling people not to think, to shut up and go along with the program, results in pain and violence almost 100% of the time. But the religions Clarke feared mostly have this as a fundamental tenet of the religion.. (Judaism is at least a little different than this, I understand, but I am not really that familiar with it.)

    But then you go into how fraternities justify dirty deeds, and I don't get where you're coming from. What fraternities? What dirty deeds?

    And then you go really wacked out and say that Katz' motivation of protecting us from the inquisition is a bad one.

    Say what? Where the hell did you get that? Katz was reviewing a book, remember? I guess you swallowed the assertion that he's a Mason hook, line, and sinker. And where 'enemies of Jews' came from is entirely beyond me.

    I agree with you that anti-inquisition probably doesn't belong here, and judging from the overall quality of this thread, I believe this will be my last post on it.

  • Alexander Graham Bell was not born in the US, he was born in Scotland. He did not die in the US, he died at his home-for-half-a-year-every-year-he-lived-this-side -of-the-atlantic in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, Canada. He is not buried in the US, his bones lie on Canadian soil, in a place where Scottish culture holds strong (French culture also has a hold, it's all just boiled together over time). I'll grant that his invertions found there way to the US patent office 'technically' making them US inventions, but the MAN would have to be called a Scottsman more than anything.
  • So what if he got American citizenship, the point I was getting at was he never truly integrated into the American 'melting pot' as it were. He probably got Canadian citizenship. He probably never lost his Scottish citizenship. Citizenship itself just gives you added rights within a country, it doesn't mean shit for where your pride goes.
  • I think that the ABC Computer was first. Check out this website for more info...

    http://www.iastate.edu/abc.html
  • I don't know whether anyone will read a post this far down, but I was offline in Amsterdam all day so I've only just logged in.

    I have however, something to say on the matter of the 'first computer' debate that may be of interest. As one other post (at least) has pointed out, a number of people were working on similar ideas that arguably resulted in the first computer.

    A good analogy is the jet engine. Both Wittel and the Heinkel firm (Britain and Germany respectively) were working on similar ideas at similar times. Ultimately the first jet plane to fly was German, but it is questionable who came up with the idea first.

    Can't we just agree that the computer like the jet engine, was brought to frution during wartime, and ultimately benefitted most of us.

    There is no love lost between myself and America (as a culture and ideal, not as individuals), but I can't help feeling that this nationalist ``we invented it first'' mentality is fruitless ...

    Chris Wareham
  • Actually, through the preferences feature, Slashdot can be customized for anyone's tastes.
  • It was the first (in the US) to use binary as its internal representation, and it had a form of dynamic RAM (a cylinder of capacitors that rotated past a brush assembly that kept them refreshed/charged). The sad thing is, this capacitor drum is the only thing that remains. When a grad student (later head of the CS dept) needed an office, he was told that he could have one "if he cleaned the junk out of it". Guess what the "junk" consisted of?
  • During the dark days of WWII Alan Turing helped break the German Enigma codes. This was in England at Bletchley Park, where Turing collaberated on the building of Colossus, one of several different special purpose digital computers.

    Prior to that, I believe that a German University had built a digital computer, in the 1930's. I don't think that this resulted in significant research beyond preliminary experiments.

    By any standards, the first digital computer that was used to do something would be Colossus which predated ENIAC by years.

    I really hate the kind of centrism that mandates that history needs to be rewritten so that one's country can be favored in the eyes of the world. Scott McCartney is wrong, wrong, wrong about ENIAC being first. I wouldn't put much credibility in a history book that gets something as primary as this incorrect.

  • Who invented the computer? Who knows? If you include mechanical devices, you could go back even before Babbage. It's like the automobile; the concept dates back to the late 1600s (a clockwork-powered machine from Nuremburg).

    Eckert and Mauchly were the tandem Henry Ford of the computer industry -- whether or not they were the first people to build a computer, they were the first to create a commercially-available computer. (Although this being Slashdot, someone will likely soon post contradictory info.... :)

    -- Dirt Road

  • Hate to stun you, but everyone in America didn't see "Triumph Of The Nerds," and judging from e-mail, tons of /. readers don't know bout Eckert and Mauchly. Course we could just personalize the site for you.
  • One of the Manchester machines (I cannot remember if it was the Mark I or the SSEM) was a stored program computer, and therefore the first electronic stored program computer. There were probably mechanical predecessors though.

    Looking back, there is a continuity of calculating machines all the way back to the abacus, each of which was the first to implement some notable feature of modern computers.
  • I don't blame the school system. It's that historically the greater computer community hasn't demanded truth over marketing fluff. We've gotten so used to marketeers telling us that their companies invented everything that we haven't insisted on honoring the truth of history.

    Happily, I see this changing. The online community is now demanding fact over fluff. The days of simply accepting marketing garbage as fact are over. People want reality. The history of those who came before will rise from the ashes of the burning lies and half-truths which have scorched the computing terrain. And the worthless marketing banter of the self-aggrandizing fools will fall to earth and be lost.

    There. I feel better now... 8^}
  • Z3, ENIAC, Colossus, ABC, Mark I, fine. Does it really matter who's first with these things? These were all, indeed, programmable devices, but if you saw one today, it wouldn't resemble what we all call a computer. Indeed, they were only incrementally better than punched card tabulating machines, which by that time, could be configured to execute more than simple counting and additions.

    These devices were not stored-program computers: you had to physically reconfigure them for each new program, instead of supplying your program along with your data.

    ENIAC, schmENIAC. Remember Mauchly and Eckert, but remember them because they went on to found UNIVAC Corp., and to design and produce the UNIVAC, the first commercially available stored-program electronic computer, indeed, the first commercially available electronic computer of any kind. The UNIVAC had an immesurably bigger influence on the history of computing than any of these other devices. It was because of the UNIVAC that IBM, for instance (then a manufacturer of punched card tabulating machines), got into the business of making electronic computers, and set them on the path to become the company we all know and love.

  • Jon Katz wonders why we do know who invented stuff, but not who built the first computer.

    This is because the invention of the computer was by a lot of different people, all working on different aspects (a lot started before electricity was there). These guys were just the people who applied what others before them had figured out.

    He also mentions the first people on the moon. But that is mostly the personal achievement.
    Question: Who was the first person to get any kind of (unmanned) junk launched on the moon. Oh shame, nobody knows......

    Turing was also involved with computer-inventions at the same time, but everybody knows him. So it's not like we know nothing of the computers origins (Von Neumann also).

  • you could get one of uPenn's ENIAC [upenn.edu] on a chip samples and start porting - not sure how Linux will make use of the "square rooter" but that's a good start on a math-coprocessor.

    Chuck
  • yeeetch -

    btw - who can name the inventors of the transistor and integrated circuit as easily as the inventors of the light bulb, telephone, powered manned flight?

    Chuck

  • (Score:1)

    by EnglishTim ( 9662 )
    I was under the impression that Colossus had now been given the crown of 'First computer' but always with these things it seems to revolve around definitions:

    'First stored-program computer'
    'First digital computer'
    'First digital computer with a stored program'
    'First computer with a turbo button'
    'First computer youcould play Space War on'

    etc...

  • I had the title as "Insert Colossus/Eniac flame war here" except contained within greater than and less than symbols... evidently the whole thing was removed as a html tag... oops!

  • The "invention" of the computer is a very complicated subject that I don't think any one book (even a good one like ENIAC) or discussion in /. can come to grips with.

    First of all, the ENIAC was something that any current geek would recognize as a computer. I've talked to John Mauchly's widow, Kathleen Antonelli, who was one of the original programmers on the ENIAC, and while it may not have been a stored-memory computer, it was programmable. She coded very close to the machine.

    Mauchly was a hacker who had an itch to scratch. He wanted to be better able to model the weather and needed a computer to do it. He didn't set out to "invent" the computer, but to build a tool to get a job done. WWII gave him the resources to do this and changed the job that needed doing.

    We also need to remember that history is only obvious in retrospect. Mauchly and Eckert didn't know Turing's work (neither was a mathematician.) It was only after their very practical contribution that the idea of a Turing machine as a real machine began to make sense in any kind of widespread way.

    A half-dozen or so people made groundbreaking contributions that coalesced in our idea of the computer. Mauchly and Eckert were certainly among them.

    --Tim
  • Along with James Bardeen. Won a couple Nobel Prizes for Physics with that and later work.
  • The other bit the Wrights got first was that they mastered control before anybody else. The Europeans only accepted the Wrights claim of first flight when they demonstrated the ability to fly in a controlled path versus just a stable straight line.
  • Also THE MACHINE THAT CHANGED THE WORLD. A bit older but quite quite interesting.

    --

  • I don't know, but I hear NetBSD is working on it right now. ;)
  • Zuse (the German pronunciation is more like "Tsoo-zuh" than "Zeus") could also be credited with the invention (but not implementation) of the first high level programming language. Plankalkül is a language that he wrote about in 1945, although the paper wasn't published until 1972. In this paper he defined the language and wrote algorithms in it for a wide variety of problems.

    Good thing for the rest of us that the Germans had Very Dumb Nazis to counterbalance their Very Smart Scientists.

    Reference: Concepts of Programming Languages, Fourth Edition, Robert W. Sebesta.

  • Here's some information about the Z3: http://irb.cs.tu-berlin.de/~zuse/Konrad_Zuse/en/in dex.html.

    "I want to use software that doesn't suck." - ESR
    "All software that isn't free sucks." - RMS

  • I think that it would be safe to say that ENIAC was the first computer resembling our current concept of what a computer is. There were numerous earlier calculating machines (some of which were built, others never were completed, i.e. the works of Charles Babbage) Let us not forget the primitive mechanical computers believed to have been in use in ancient Greece...
  • ...Depends on who you talk to. Eckert and Mauchly have a much different story concerning those events. As you mentioned, Stanislaw Ulam worked closely with Von Neumann at Los Alamos. It may be possible that his writtings are jaded by that fact, he having only heard Von Neuman's side of the story. Of course, this is a much debated topic. In my original post, I noted that the the book /Engines of The Mind/ detailed how Von Neumann tried to take credit from Mauchly and Eckert. I did not say that this was true... /Engines of the Mind/ fails in that the author did not interview any pro-Von Neumann individuals. I believe that the controversy actually began when Von Neumann authored his first paper on the ENIAC and failed to let Mauchly and Eckert know about the it before it was published. According to /Engines of the Mind/ this made it appear that Von Neumann was the primary inventor behind ENIAC.
  • Well, not just that. It's simply because nobody has heard of Colossus. It's still officially classified under the British Official Secrets act. It only came to public light after a person who worked on it during WWII wrote a book about it 40 years on. The British government still tried to quash the book even then.
  • Not forgetting the steam locomotive, RADAR and the Jet engine ;-)

  • Re: (Score:1)

    by neillm ( 15958 )
    ENIAC was just a calculator too - it produced ballistic tables.
  • Yup, plus it's rocket engine was built on German technology.
  • Actually, you can see a Colossus in action at Bletchley Park, England. They built one working entirely from photo records and the knowledge of the surviving original team members. Pretty impressive stuff.
  • Babbage's analytical engine was built, but a few years ago... using the technologies available in the 19th century.

    The reasons why it didn't get built in the first place are 1)Babbage couldn't get it financed and 2)He died.

    For the record, the whole thing was the size of a football field and needed six steam engines to run. And it worked! One thing: does anybody know if Babbage was converted to binary or if he was still using base ten for his engine? I'm no-one in maths... I just like history.

    I wish I could find a page about it right now, but I feel lazy.


  • In the same sense that it is correct to say
    Microsoft Windows (As Slashdotter's favourite O/S)

    teehee!

  • Contrary to popular (mostly American) belief, Thomas Edison did not invent the lightbulb either.

    Checkout the full story [rr.com]


    Lord Pixel - The cat who walks through walls
  • Actually our computers are a little better than finite state machines - finite state machines have no memory only a state if its a Deterministic FSM or n states if its a Nondeterministic FSM. It might interest you to know that a FSM is equivalent to a regular expression. IMHO our computers are more like turning machines with a finite tape. I've always thought of the microprocessor as a Universal Turing Machine it accepts instructions(equivalent to another Turing machine) and data(equivalent to the tape covered in symbols) and then acts like its that other Turing machine operating on that tape covered in symbols.
  • Wouldn't it be more accurate to say: A.G. Bell (an American)
  • He obtained US Citizenship later in his life, dummy...
  • Well I don't know how you define favorite, but last I checked a plorality (majority?) of slashdot users used IE on a Windows platform.
  • First computer you could play Space War on

    Not entirely dissimilar to a definition I've often used, which is that a computer is something you can play Tetris on... It works surprisingly well, apart from the minor problem that it also assumes that little LCD tetris games are computers.
  • I thought Colossus was first, not Eniac.
  • Well, if being born in Scotland makes him an American... then hey, I must be an American!
  • Unfair! Both sides invented it separately. The key thing to remember is that although the British effort was first, it was classified. Classified crypto is so far ahead of publically available stuff that it's a different race - they are the Ben Johnson 100 meters record holders, where instead of drugs they have superior resources and perhaps most of the best reasearchers.

    Chris Morgan
    -British and American, as it happens (both passports).

  • Re: (Score:1)

    by StoneDog ( 28523 )
    If I am not mistaken Colossus was closer kin to the calculator because it had one single purpose, codebreaking. I guess I can agree with the argument that a computer must be able to accept arbitrary instruction sets with a variable purpose. Otherwise Tic-tac-toe is matrix algebra :-) .

    "I've lost my flower," said Tom lackadaisically.

  • I don't think anyone here has argued any "America is Holier than Thou" statements. So far, I've read a lot of "Us folks in the UK had the first" and one scottish / canadian rant. But no "america is holier than thou" statements at all. Short of the book itself, which isn't nationalistic...just interesting reading about two guys who made a computer back when "a computer" was whatever the hell you wanted it to be.
  • IIRC the HP 55 programable calculator was an almost exact match for the Eniac specs.
    Something like 10 10-digit memory registers and 50 instruction words. Too long ago to remember precisely ;-(
    Sorry, no room for ANY kind of Operating System.
  • If I remember right Collossus was also mainly operated by women, for similar reasons, although I dont think they wrote the programs. This means that initially the female Geeks out numbered the male ones.

    Collosus was designed and built by Tommy Flowers, who must surely be the most forgottten pioneer of the computer age.

    bil
  • "A History of Modern Computing" by Paul Ceruzzi is also quite good, and places ENIAC in context.
  • No URL here, but Bell's patent on the telephone was granted under shady circumstances as well. I think that the opening paragraph of the above article needs to be rewritten and checked for accuracy.


    -nme
  • I agree that the war started with Japan & China, but I don't think it can be called a world war until 1939, when Austalia/New Zealand, Afria, Europe, and Canada were all involved.

  • I ordered my copy from Amazon this morning.

    gee
  • Although I agree with you on technical grounds, that is, the Atanasoff-Berry Computer (ABC) should not be considered the first computer because it was not generally programmable, a judge agreed with Iowa State University in the '70s that the ABC was the first electronic digital computer, which Iowa State now trumpets with much fanfare. I was a CS student there, so I know. Is it any wonder why I transferred? :-)

    The ABC was, however, the first machine to use binary arithmetic and to use drum memory (I think). So it's a significant development in its own right, but it wasn't a real computer, even if that's what the legal documents say.

    Jon
  • See my above post. The ABC is a computer only in the eyes of the courts (and Iowa State!). It was not generally programmable, even mechanically. All it did was solve systems of linear equations.

    Jon
  • ENIAC on a chip [upenn.edu] (linked from ESR [tuxedo.org]'s Retrocomputing museum [tuxedo.org]).
  • Interesting that you should ask who invented the light bulb as well as the first computer.

    Others have pointed out that Colussus has a pretty strong claim to the first computer (only slightly hampered by the fact that it was officially secret until the 70s).

    But are you sure Edison invented the light bulb? Joseph Swan had one earlier (although it didn't work that well).

    There are of course strong cultural biases here: I'm British, as were Swan and Colussus. I'm sure a Frenchman could tell you the two Frenchmen who invented the lightbulb & computer, and so on for other nationalities.

    And you're just following the American bias on this.
  • If I understand properly, there's a vast difference between a "Von Neumann machine" (a theoretical self-replicating space probe) and a "Von Neumann architecture" (the stored program computers we know and love).
  • wow.. now that's sarcasm you can frame.

  • Re:Telephone, Lightbulb, Flight (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Wrights were first for heavier-than-air powered flight, but not for the "Manned flight" that Katz referred to. (Even discounting a hundred years of balloon flights before the Wright brothers, there were heavier than air gliders, Chinese on kites etc, already in existence.)

    It's rather like Lindberg flying across the Atlantic. About 110 people flew across the Atlantic before him, but Lindberg just happened to be the first solo flight, and the first American to get a significant record (the original flight was Alcock and Brown in a WWI Vickers bomber in 1919.)

    And what significance does a solo flight really have in aviation technology?

  • Brit Military secrecy (better version) (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    (marginally off-topic, but not toxically so)

    The real horror story of British cryptographic secrecy concerns what happened to Alan Turing after the war. Turing basically masterminded Bletchley Park, and did a lot of the design work on Colossus (for what it's worth, I would not consider Colossus the "first computer" because, IIRC it was not a universal Turing machine, which would be my criterion for "computerness". I'm less certain about the MkII, however).

    Then he settled down to life after the war as a mathematician. But unfortunately, one of his lovers burgled his house, and in reporting the crime to the police, Turing accidentally revealed that he was gay.

    We treated him shamefully. Turing saved us quite literally from salvation in the Battle of the Atlantic, and we pumped him so full of "experimental hormone treatments" that he grew breasts. Unsurprisingly, he committed suicide.

    A pretty shocking way to treat a war hero, one might say. But, of course, nobody knew that he was one. He wasn't allowed to plead his war record, because it was all so very confidential.

    Pretty sick if you ask me.

    jsm

  • GNU/ENIAC (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Fools!

    Don't you know that the system known as ENIAC wouldn't have been possible without components first developed by the FSF?

    RMS demands tribute! Change the name to GNU/ENIAC, or he'll hassle more reporters!

    Nyuk nyuk nyuk... Hey, use BSD and really cheese off RMS.
  • I would say that Alan Turing invented the computer - after all every digital computer today is a Universal Turing Machine. But he only did it on paper.

    Then the question becomes who built the first working electronic, stored program, digital computer.

    ...richie

    P.S. Except maybe Charles Babagge thought of it too. I haven't studied his Analytical Engine.

  • Check out the story on the other side of the pond [turing.org.uk].

  • The first working, fully programmable general purpose computer was Konrad Zuse's Z3 (Germany, 1941).

    And now you have a chance to hear Konrad Zuse's son talk about his father's work! Check out the Vintage Computer Festival coming October 2-3 at the Santa Clara Convention Center in the Silicon Valley.

    Take a look at the web site at www.vintage.org [vintage.org] for more info.

    This is an event you simply don't want to miss if you are a computer historian, or just want to learn more about the history of our industry. The VCF will feature speakers, exhibits, and a marketplace where you can reacquire your past.

  • What I meant to say was:

    Actually, there are a lot of people who do collect computers [sinasohn.com] and are working to preserve the history [chac.org] of the computer industry.

    Sorry... It was early...

  • To debate what was the first computer, who invented it, and so on, check out the Vintage Computer Festival [vintage.org] coming up October 2-3 in the heart of the Silicon Valley.

    There are a lot of people out there (including myself [sinasohn.com]) working feverishly to preserve the history of the computer industry.

    If you have any interest in the subject, or want to find out about your professional roots, check out the VCF [vintage.org]. It's also a perfect opportunity to show your kids what it was like back in the good old days before widely available internet access, GUI's, and virtually unlimited computer resources.

    There will be exhibits, speakers, and a very active marketplace where you can pick up software, accessories, and even complete systems. One of the speakers will be Konrad Zuse's son, who will surely discuss his father's computers and their place in history relative to ENIAC.

  • It's a weird thing that computers, in this age when we record every darn thing ever done and collect cereal boxes or Band-Aid boxes, would have an unclear ancestry. Of course, I blame it on military secrecy.

    Actually, there are a lot of people who do collect computers/A> and are working to preserve the [sinasohn.com]history [chac.org] of the computer industry. For example, see if you know what the first personal computer [blinkenlights.com] was!

    Coming up soon is the Vintage Computer Festival [vintage.org] where collectors, historians, and enthusiasts will gather for a week-end full of speakers, exhibits, and trading. Don't miss it if you possibly can!

  • /Engines of the Mind/ by Joel Shurkin is another great book that discusses mauchly and eckert in great length, their creating of the ENIAC and John Von Neuman's attempts to claim credit for their work...
  • The ABC (Atanassoff/Berry Computer) was definitely before ENIAC, and some of ENIAC's design was cribbed from the ABC. UNIVAC's patents were overturned in court in 1973 because of this.

  • Not only was the ABC built first, but Mauchly got a grand tour of the lab and of ABC years before building ENIAC. In fact, after Mauchly and Eckert had held the patent for a while on the digital computer, it was John Atanasoff's testimony that pretty much helped bust the patent due to prior art. (In fact, Atanasoff and Iowa State had begun putting together a patent application themselves, but WWII intervened, and the application was still sitting in a file cabinet at the university.)

    I have forgotten the technical details, but as I recall, ENIAC did have some important technical improvements over the ABC. But the ABC does count as a pre-ENIAC electronic digital computer.

    "Cleverness kills wisdom"
    -- G. K. Chesterton, What's Wrong With The World

  • I quote here from "Science, Computers and People" -- a work by the legendary mathematician Stanislaw Ulam. (von Neumann and Ulam worked together at Los Alamos during WWII.) This is from Chapter 18: "John von Neumann on Computers and the Brain":

    "Von Neumann became interested in the possibilities of electronic computing machines during the Second World War. In the beginning he was primarily concerned with the logic of the operation of such machines, but he was the first to devise a means by which a machine with fixed circuits could deal flexibly with a variety of mathematical problems. Before he had entered the field, the solution of each problem required a different set of wiring connections."

    From Chapter 16:

    "[D]uring 1944 and 1945, he formulated the now fundamental methods of translating a set of mathematical procedures into a language of instructions for a computing machine. The electronic machines of that time (e.g., the Eniac) lacked the flexibility and generality which they now possess in the handling of mathematical problems...The engineering of the computing machines owes a great deal to von Neumann. The logical schemata of the machines, the planning of the relative roles of their memory, their speed, the selection of fundamental 'orders' and their circuits in the present machines bear heavily the imprint of his ideas. Von Neumann himself supervised the construction of a machine at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton...In receiving the Fermi prize of the Atomic Energy Commission, von Neumann was cited especially for his contribution to the development of computing on the electronic machines..."

    As you can see, it was in fact John von Neumann who *invented* the concept of the stored program and thus what we now understand as computers. While perhaps it was others who had the idea that electronic components could be strung together to solve problems (whether it was Zuse, Astanoff/Berry or Mauchley/ Eckert), it was von Neumann's conceptual breakthrough that opened the door to true computing.

  • After all of the recent discussion of copyright, I'm surprised that no-one else has commented on this one... the AC post 'The book has an essential flaw' is cut & pasted exactly from a customer comment on the Amazon.com listing for this book. The original author was juergen@idsia.ch from Lugano, Switzerland. The initial comment was on August 26, 1999, with a followup on September 6.

    Andy
  • It's a weird thing that computers, in this age when we record every darn thing ever done and collect cereal boxes or Band-Aid boxes, would have an unclear ancestry. Of course, I blame it on military secrecy.

    Thing is, I'm not sure what's the basis here for saying these guys invented the first computer. Basically, they fell into anonymity because they failed to produce something worthwhile during the course of WW2. Their computer calculated ballistic trajectories in 15 mins instead of a few hours? Turing, at the same time, was decoding German Enigma and screwing up the German war effort by himself.

    It's not what you think of that matters, when it comes to innovation and invention; I probably thought about the concept of the next huge scientific revolution while taking a bath the other day. I once formulated the very basis of Superstring theory when I was in seventh grade. I thought up the idea of Quantum Chromodynamics while half-drunk at a friend's birthday party. I postulated the Internet's impact on commerce in a college philosophy class. The point here is, I couldn't use any of them, put them into an equation or found a company that would make Bill Gates beg me for change.

    That is to say: it doesn't matter who thinks it first. What matters is what you do with it, and how fast you can chunk out results. We all get brilliant ideas, and that's why we don't remember who thought of something first, but rather, who invented something practical first.

    "There is no surer way to ruin a good discussion than to contaminate it with the facts."

  • I thought the question "Who invented the first electronic computer?" was pretty much still an open one. Atanasoff, Zuse and various others come to mind. I understand ENIAC was probably the most influential early electronic computer; and a very important milestone, this is still controversial nevertheless.

    It is amazing that historians still could not figure who really was the first. On second thought, I don't expect to, there are a lot of controversies in this field(recent examples: Two engineers from an aerospace company (Grumman, I believe) claim to have invented the microprocesor before Intel, and Russians and Americans are still debating on who invented the first superscalar computer).

    So, who invented the first electronic computer really? This can turn into a really interesting discussion...

    Of course, as with any computer architecture mentioned here, the quintessential Slashdot rule will still apply to ENIAC, and we shall soon see the obligatory posts about porting Linux to ENIAC and running a Beowulf cluster on reconstructed ENIACs.
  • If you are interested in the history of the first electronic digital computer you really should check out the site [ameslab.gov]

    Being an alumnus of Iowa State University, it always irks me when the ABC goes completely unmentioned in the history of computing.
  • Some information for those interested in such stuff:

    According to Bletchley Park (UK):
    The world's first programmable computer, Colossus I, was designed and operated in Bletchley Park. It was used to obtain the key to a sophisticated German cypher used personally by Hitler and his High Command. Its success led to the building of ten more Mk II models, which were operational in F Block in 1944. This block, the world's first computer complex, is still standing in Bletchley Park.

    But it would appear that programming is open to some interpretation so.. from cranfield univsersity (UK) comes some more information: from their web page [cranfield.ac.uk]

    Colossus, hardware details
    Input: cipher text punched onto 5 hole paper tape read at 5,000 characters per second by optical reader
    Output: Buffered onto relays: Typewriter printing onto paper roll
    Processor: Memory 5 characters of 5 bits held in a shift register. Clock speed 5kc/s derived from input tape sprocket holes. Internally generated bit streams totalling 501 bits in rings of lengths equal to the number of mechanical lugs on each of the 12 Lorenz wheels. A large number of pluggable logic gates. 20 decade counters arranged as 5 by 4 decades. 2,500 valves.
    Power supplies: +200v to -150v at up to 10A.
    Power consumption: 4.5KWatt
    Size: Two banks of racks 7ft 6inches high by 16ft wide spaced 6 ft apart. Bedstead, 7ft 6inches high 4ft wide by 10ft long

    Colossus, operating cycles
    The basic machine cycle: read a character from tape, get bits from bit stream generators, perform up to 100 logic operations, clock result into decade counters.
    The cycle determined by the input tape: The intercepted enciphered text tape is joined into a continuous loop with about 150 blank characters in the join. Specially punched start and stop holes indicate the beginning and end of the cipher text.

    On receipt of start hole pulse: Start bit stream generators and send sampling pulses to reader output. Execute basic machine cycle until receipt of stop hole pulse: Staticise counter states onto relays. After a delay, reset counters and reset bit stream generators to a new start position.

    Colossus programming
    All programmes hard wired, some permanently, some pluggable. Conditional jumping possible between alternative programmes depending on counter outputs.

    To conclude
    does this constitute a "properly" programmable computer? Well it was at least partialy programmable, and the Mark II was even more so, but at the end of the day, as other people have said:
    It's all a question of your deffinition ;)


  • Hi am sick to death of all this 'America is Holier than Thou' crap! America was not the home of the first digital computer, England had Colossus and used it to decipher the Enigma codes (For those of you who are arguing the term first 'useful' computer - I think that covers 'useful', don't you?). Why can't most of you see outside your own country? I mean REALLY! just listen to yourselves!
  • As a society we are really into superlatives. Whatever is the biggest, fastest, first or most extereme we like. So which was really first? ENIAC? ABC? Z3?

    The significance of Eckert and Mauchly's ENIAC isn't necessarily that it was the very earliest design of a programmable computer. It is generally acknowledged that Charles Babbage had the idea of a machine to do arithmetic, but was limited by the technology of the time. It is intersting to note that ENIAC was put together by Eckert and Mauchly without any knowledge of Babbage and the work that had already been done. (They could have saved themselves a lot of trouble.)

    What is MOST important about ENIAC is what it did, and when. It was the first computer project to recieve hundreds of thousands of dollars in funding from the military.

    It accurately showed that original plans for the H-bomb would not work.

    The unveiling of the ENIAC merited a front page story on the New York Times. It sparked the imaginations of others to build better computers. It proved to everyone that age of electronically mechanized arithmetic had arrived.

    The ENIAC's design subsequently spawned the EDVAC, BINAC, and the UNIVAC (Universal Automatic Calculator, which accurately predicted Eisenhower's landslide presidential victory on CBS News, to the disbelief of CBS reporters and sponsors. The last UNIVAC lasted until 1969!)

    Indeed, it may be argued which was really the very first computer, but it must be acknowledged that Eckert and Mauchly's ENIAC was the first major breakthrough in the field as far as publicity was concerned. And at the time, every bit of publicity that could be gained was critical to the advancement of computers.

    But to get the most clear picture of the history of computers, we must look at it less like a singular, linear thread and more like a tapestry, with many significant things that happened simultaneously, many brilliant minds and contributors, and many stories that led up to what we have today.

  • Re:The book has an essential flaw (Score:3)

    by Chalst ( 57653 ) on Wednesday September 08, 1999 @12:33AM (#1696188) Homepage Journal
    Funny about how the history of computing is taught along national lines: I always learnt (I'm British) that the first general purpose computer (the Small Scale Experimental Machine, or SSEM) was built in Manchester, UK, in 1948, and german friends of mine learnt about the Z3 in school. Actually the SSEM was the first machine to store programs in memory: debatably a key component of the general purpose computer. I guess what counts as the first general purpose computer depends upon what you consider a machine needs to count as general purpose. Anyway you can read about the SSEM at Computer 50 [computer50.org].

  • The book has an essential flaw (Score:5)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 08, 1999 @12:01AM (#1696189)
    The book has at least one essential flaw. The first working, fully programmable general purpose computer was Konrad Zuse's Z3 (Germany, 1941). ENIAC (inspired by Atanasoff's earlier, less general designs) was fully programmable too, but came much later (in 1946).

    Both Atanasoff (US-American of Bulgarian origin) and Zuse built limited calculators in the 1930s (e.g., 1935-38 Zuse completed the Z1, the first fully mechanical, programmable digital machine, and Atanasoff built electronic devices). But if we include mere calculators among "computers" then neither Zuse nor Atanasoff were first. Non-general purpose devices have been around for a long time (since the days of Leibniz and Pascal).

    Z3's switches were based on relays instead of tubes like in ENIAC. This is no fundamental difference. There are many ways of implementing a switch. Today we use transistors, of course.

    The Z3 was destructed in an air raid in 1944. It never got the publicity of ENIAC. Still, 1966 - 1995 Zuse finally received uncountable awards and world-wide appreciation as "Inventor of the Computer."

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