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Hardware

UNIVAC's 50th Anniversary 56

Posted by Hemos from the lots-of-candles-to-blow-out dept.
A reader writes: "50 years may not sound like a whole lot of time. But in the computer industry it really is a great acomplishment. The UNIVAC is celebrating it's 50th anniversary."
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UNIVAC's 50th Anniversary More

UNIVAC's 50th Anniversary

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  • correction (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Philadelphia was the birthplace of UNIVAC, the first computer designed and built for non-military purposes.

    Uhm, Babbage's analytical engine anyone? It amazes me how people ignore pre 20th century computing.

  • Re:UNIVAC emulation (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    What's better? (a) a UNIVAC emulation project or (b) sex with a mare

    What a silly question. I mean, the two aren't even comparable. One is a bit tough to do, but very rewarding. The other seems completely unnatural. B is the obvious answer.

  • Vacuum tubes forever! (Score:3)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 31, 2001 @07:18AM (#325568)
    Vacuum tubes are INDIGENOUS EARTH technology.

    Aliens have long wanted to conquer the Earth. But while possessing superrior space flight technology, they possessed inferrior weapons technology. So they came up with The Plan.

    They deliberately crashed one of their vehicles into New Mexico in the 1940s. It was filled with solid state technology. Transistors, silicon, etc.

    They GAVE us this technology in hopes that we would adopt it and grow dependent on it. And we have. The US gov't along with some selected companies used the tech to create the first transistor (Bell Labs), the first microprocessor (Intel), and so on. Later unleashing newer tech, MSI, LSI, VLSI, etc. It's still going on today ("Coppermine", etc.) Technology was disseminated slowly over time and across a great many companies, some outside the US to dissuede suspicion of the real source of all this new tech.

    Well, we've since pretty much abandoned tubes, vibrators, points (automotive ignition), carburreated engines, core memory, and such. We are now totally dependent on silicon, microcontrollers, transistors, EFI, and other alien based technology.

    And now, all according to The Plan, the aliens can now EMP the Earth from orbit. All our defenses would fail. Missiles would lay dormant in silos. The military would be powerless. Planes would fall out of the sky. Trains would stop. Cars would stop. All world financial information would be wiped out. Life as we know it would grind to a halt. The aliens would be able to take over easily, in the ensuing chaos.

    Our early indigineous Earth science was a threat to them, because cars with carburreators and floats and points ignition, as well as communications gear, missile guidance systems, apollo space vehicles, and computers using vacuum tubes, relays, vibrators, ferrite core memory and such would all continue to operate under continuous EMP bursts and even in high radiation environments (such as a missile launched at the alien's space ship or home world). The aliens wanted to neutralize the threat and they succeeded.

    Except for us few who realized what was going on. When the EMP pulse and the aliens arive, me and my buddies will be the only ones on the road in our 55 Chevy trucks, communicating on our refurbished army surplus PRC-25 radios. Tracking them on our klystron based radar, predicting their actions on our vacuum tube and core memory computers. Our bands of soldiers are in place around the nation, and around the globe. The "right wing radical" groups you today fear, will be the ones to defend humanity when the time comes.

    Bring it on alien doods. We're on to you.

  • In fact, that is the precise reason tubes were used. Those suckers could still fly even in the aftermath of a thermonuclear strike!
  • Remember, clock frequency isn't everything. Perhaps it just did very little in one clock cycle. For instance, an instruction that added two registers with n bits (I don't know what the real word size was) might take n+2 cycles whereas on a later computer it would take 1 cycle (or maybe less since it could execute in parallel with another instruction).
  • She was the first programmer, period. At least, according to all my CS textbooks.
  • They do a lot of systems/software integration and support work for government and private industry (in particular with banks, airlines and the insurance industry).

    In addition, you're probably interested in things that you can touch. They have always made mainframes and the software to go with them. There are two lines of machines: the OS2200 Series from the Sperry-Univac side of the company and the A-Series from the Burroughs side. Their latest machine (mentioned in another post) is the ES7000, a 32-way Intel box that can be partitioned into up to 8 independent machines in the same chassis (it will be able to run Itanium chips alongside P3's, when they are available).

    Disclaimer: I play with the big-boy toys (A-Series) at Unisys, but I do not speak for them. That's what their webpage [unisys.com] is for.

  • So, this is why the Russian MIG 25 captured in 1978 had vacuum-tube electronics!!!!

    --

  • Re:correction (Score:4)

    by Pig Hogger ( 10379 ) <pig@hogger.gmail@com> on Saturday March 31, 2001 @10:23AM (#325574) Journal
    BTW anyone know what UNISYS do these days? Are they just a glorified consultant shop? Do they actually have a product?
    They have a product, indeed, and they do is collect royalties on it. The product is the .GIF format.

    --

  • 386. The Linux kernel requires protected mode.
  • The only interesting thing I could find in Unisys is http://search.unisys.com/search/default.asp?sectio n=allsections&q1=linux


    --
    Leandro Guimarães Faria Corcete Dutra
    DBA, SysAdmin
  • Vacuum. There's nothing like it. Give nothing more.

    Sponsored by the Vacuum Consumption Board.

  • The first computer designed and built

    Babbage's engine was a theoretical exercise which was never actually built - at least at the time. It demanded engineering tolerances way beyond what was available back then.

  • My airplane won't fall from the sky because of silicon. Why? Because the FAA, in its infinite wisdom and classic governmental inertia is only now realizing that electronic ignition might work in airplanes. Better late than never, I guess.

    I (and almost every other light plane pilot on the planet) have MAGNETOS, big, heavy, wirewound spinning spark generators, with nothing more advanced than a diode for sex appeal.

    I hear they're good for interrogating prisoners too, if you hook them up to a little sponge...

  • My dad was a longtime UNIVAC/Sperry Univac/Unisys (the power of 2) veteran.

    The first keyboard I ever touched was on the 1108 at 2121 Wisconsin Avenue, Sperry Univac's DC office in the 70's. Rumor has it that they heated the building with air from the machine rooms there.

    I gather that NASA really loved their machines, or at the very least had a bunch of them, because my Dad would spend weeks at the Cape. I'm still kicking myself for actually sticking all of those mission stickers he gave me onto things.

    I dimly remember a story about how one of the guidance computers for an Apollo mission didn't have enough memory (core?) to hold the entire course after launch. As I recall, just after launch, they powered down the guidance computer, leaving the rocket on its own for a little while, and quickly loaded the rest of the program and rebooted the box. I think he said something about not telling the astronauts until afterward.

    If you know anyone who worked on UNIVACs, ask them about the drum memories...
  • Actually, they _did_ have precise enough manufacturing capability to build Babbage's machines - this has already been proven by the building of Difference Engine No. 2 at the Science Museum [nmsi.ac.uk] in London. Scientific American had an article on it, discussing how they built the parts to the tolerances specified, and the resulting machine worked excellently. Portions of the machine were built after Babbage's death, proving that it could be done (more info on this and other interesting Babbage info can be found here [fourmilab.ch]).

    It is my opinion (shared by a lot of researchers) that Babbage failed primarily for two reasons; a) He could never "settle down" and build any one of his calculating machines, he was constantly dreaming of improvements and never committing to one design, draining his resources to the point of where they abandoned him (.com failure?), and b) his machines simply weren't practical for the time period, for their huge cost. People at the time didn't have a pressing need for enormous amounts of calculating power, that couldn't be provided for by cheaper human labor (so called later "computers"). It wasn't until the late 1800's that the need for real mechanical/electrical computing power began to be felt (look into Hollerith and the 1890 census for one take - there are others, of course, notably Lord Kelvin's Tide Predicting machine of 1876, while being analog, does demonstrate the need for mechanical models of complex computing problems - in fact, this particular use was not overtaken in any large part by digital computers until the 1950's), in fact, this was the time during which many "inventors" came forth with their own takeoffs of Babbage's machine - it should be noted that these were all portions of "Difference" engines, some original, some of Babbage's design. None were of the scale and complexity of his Analytical engine, though I believe a portion of the mill was completed by one of his sons after his death. It actually worked rather well, computing the successive sums of PI (though with errors, some tracable to machine problems, most likely spring related, but the major problem being that the input for the initial value of PI was off in one digit - thus, perhaps one of the first examples of GIGO as it relates to computers).

    Thus, we have two points of failure: One, a character "flaw" (something that affects many hackers even to this day), and the second a lack of practical need.

    It's too bad - his machines could have radically shaped our world...


    Worldcom [worldcom.com] - Generation Duh!
  • Which may have been used for buzz bombs guidance systems.

    The V1 "buzz bomb" (so called because of the distinct "buzzing" sound they made while in flight, due to using pulse jet engines - really, one of these has to be heard to be believed - I helped set up for a demo of one of the pulse jet engines SRL built for one of their latest machine, a hovercraft powered by four of them - bone shaking loud and hot was this engine - truely a sight to behold) was a "set-it-and-forget-it" type system.

    Launch down a track, aimed on a straight vector (via a combination of the track and a gyroscopic navigational system, similar to early rockets) towards its destination (London), a timer was set on the engine throttle. Knowing the speed of the V1, the timer was set to cut off the engine when it was over the target, causing the bomb to "glide dive" in (it had wings - it was basically a pulse-jet propelled airplane with a bomb inside). In fact, RAF pilots got quite good at deflecting these bombs by flying next to them, getting a wing underneath one of the bomb's wings, then rolling their plane to "flip" the bomb into a death spiral of sorts.

    All of this changed with the appearance of the V2 rockets (though navigation was still horrible, these machines being basic forerunners of modern ballistic missles - they still were effective in promoting a sense of fear among the masses of London, because they could hit anywhere, without advanced warning - they simply fell from the sky)...

    Worldcom [worldcom.com] - Generation Duh!
  • I used to work at Unisys, writing device drivers. It is actually a really neat place in terms of technology. The first time I toured their lab I was amazed at all the different types of technology in there. They had some old mainframes that had uptimes in years. Products that were over a decade old and were still in use and still solved the problem they were purchased to solve. As mentioned by some others, the ES7000 and its CMP architecture is pretty cool. By the way, although it does run Windows 2000 Data Center Server (heck, the release of Win2kDCS waited for Unisys to complete various improvements on Win2kDCS), it also runs SCO Unix. There was talk of other ports in the future. It is neat to have a windows/unix machine that supports hot swap of nearly everything (memory, processors, i/o devices) and dynamic partitioning. Can't be that bad when you consider that Compaq, Dell, and HP all have decided to OEM it rather than build a box of their own in that class. Plus it comes with IntelliFIBRE, a FibreChannel card that I wrote device drivers for! (Yeah, I am bit biased there...but who isn't about their work?) Making big computers, software for them, and services wrapped around all of that may not be sexy, but is profitable. Something that all those .coms can't claim. Still had $6.8 billion in revenue with $334 million in profit for 2000. Not too shabby for a bad year in tech.

  • Here's the link to George Gray's "online Unisys History Newsletter [gatech.edu]".

  • Let's slashdot the Swiss! (Score:3)

    by ktakki ( 64573 ) on Saturday March 31, 2001 @09:46AM (#325585) Homepage Journal
    I'm surprised that John Walker's UNIVAC Memories [fourmilab.ch] hasn't been mentioned here (the link is http://fourmilab.ch/documents/univac/ for those wary of goatse.cx). Photos, stories, even source code...

    Excerpts:

    In 1968 you could pick up a 1.3 MHz CPU with half a megabyte of RAM and 100 megabyte hard drive for a mere US$1.6 million. Oh, and you want a printer too...?

    The FASTRAND II was the second member of the FASTRAND family, and by far the most common. The ill-fated FASTRAND I had only one rotating drum and half the storage capacity. A single massive drum rotating almost 15 times a second acts as a powerful gyroscope which tries to stay in a fixed location with respect to the distant stars. Unfortunately, the Earth rotates, and this leads to a conflict between the Earthly imperative of motion and the FASTRAND I's desire to stay put, which resulted in the devices tending to move around the computer room. In the FASTRAND II, the two drums rotated in opposite directions, which cancelled out the gyroscopic effect. The story of the Navy ship which set sail with a spinning FASTRAND only to have it stand on end at the first course change is, as far as I can determine, apocryphal.


    Walker is one of the founders of Autodesk, and is the Jargon File's "J. Random Hacker" in the flesh. His fourmilab.ch web site is an interesting place to spend a rainy afternoon (I recommend The Autodesk Files [fourmilab.ch]).

    Yes, there's a North American mirror, but I like the idea of slashdotting Switzerland. Damn gnomes.

    k.
    --
    "In spite of everything, I still believe that people
    are really good at heart." - Anne Frank
  • Why not try using a regular flatbed scanner? Scan each section of the tape, and write some code to read it?

    Alternatively, why not build a reader? Go to your local college of engineering, and see if you can interest them in making this an undergrad project.

    A stepping motor to move the tape, some LEDs and phototransistors to read it, a printer port, and some code. Fun for all: mechanical engineers, electrical engineers, and computer engineers.
  • Sorry, when you said "steel" I assumed they'd be punching holes, since trying to write to that with a mag head would be a galloping BITCH. Well, that does make it a wee more complicated. However, if you could find some old heads from somewhere (maybe use parts of an 8 track tape system? or maybe a cassette) it might still be something doable.
  • Eckert and Mauchly were not able to complete the construction of the ENIAC until late 1945, after the war had ended. The machine's importance thus lay in its design rather than in its usage. The ENIAC was the first calculating machine to incorporate the high speed of electronics into a design with a scale large enough to solve important real-world problems. Moreover, their experience with the ENIAC led Eckert and Mauchly to work on a second machine, the EDVAC, with the capability to store and modify its own instruction -- a machine that could be "programmed" in the modern sense. The EDVAC was not completed until 1952, long after Eckert and Mauchly had left the Moore School to form their own computer company. But the proof of principle of electronic computing shown by the ENIAC and von Neumann's famous technical report on the EDVAC's design inspired people around the world to begin to build computers. Eckert and Mauchly's commercial efforts were also important spawning the UNIVAC line of computers...

    Von Neumann's name has been associated widely with the invention of the computer -- the most common computer design, for example, is called "the von Neumann architecture." During the war, von Neumann, who already had a well-established reputation as a mathematician, was much in demand. He led an itinerant life, traveling by train between Los Alamos, Aberdeen, and several other locations to consult on mathematical aspects of ballistics, shock waves, and weapon design. Los Alamos needed help with the numerical modeling of a triggering device for the atomic bomb, and von Neumann made several inquiries about the availability of high-speed calculating machinery for this purpose. Nobody thought to mention the ENIAC project to him, probably because Eckert and Mauchly did not have established reputations and the design seemed hopelessly ambitious. However, when Goldstein ran across von Neumann in 1944 on a train platform in Aberdeen, introduced himself, and told von Neumann about the ENIAC project, von Neumann took an immediate interest. Goldstine quickly arranged von Neumann's appointment as a consultant at the Moore School, adding yet one more job to his list of wartime consultin assignments.

    By the time von Neumann joined the project, the ENIAC design was set and construction was well under way. Eckert, Mauchly, and others had already been meeting occasionally for more than half a year to discuss the design of the successor machine, the EDVAC. Von Neumann joined in on these discussions when he was available, every month or two. During an extended stay at Los Alamos, he wrote the Draft Report on EDVAC, which Goldstine distributed widely. Much to Eckert and Mauchly's annoyance, von Neumann's name was the only one to appear on the document. The report gave a lucid description of the functional design of the stored-program computer, using the abstract language and concepts of neural nets that had recently been invented by Warren McCulloch and Walter Pitts to emphasize the "logical design," rather than discussing specific engineering implementations. Once the war ended, von Neumann returned to the Institute for Advanced Study, where he ran his own computer project to test the value of the computer in scientific research."

    Source: William Aspray's review of the book "ENIAC: The Triumphs and Tragedies of the World's First Computer Company" by Scott McCartney
  • The 8086 debuted at 4.77mhz. That was 1978. There was also an 8mhz and a 10mhz version. It weighed in at about 29,000 transistors.
  • I remember working with the Exec 8 operating
    in the 1970's, and occasionally seeing a
    NON-SYMBIONT PRINT printout ejected by the
    line printer. Apparently a non-symbiont print
    file was a print file that had become orphaned
    from a job run. I always wondered where they
    got the word "symbiont" from. Years later, while
    visiting the Smithsonian, I got a chance to
    see the original Univac control panel close up,
    with all of its rows of gleaming toggle switches.
    Sure enough, there was a switch marked "SYMBIONT".

    A great site for for more Univac memories is
    [fourmilab.ch]
    http://www.fourmilab.ch/documents/univac/
  • You thought that you were joking about electronic porn getting an early start? Back before bitmapped graphics, students with too much time and not enought homework used to write Fortran 4 routines which would make suggestive plots on the Textronics vector terminals (it was a Honeywell mainframe). And before that, there was ascii art.


    Here [chicks-dig-unix.cx] is an example of ascii porn, which probably could have been printed by Univac. This stuff is still popular; a quick search on Google [google.com] turned up lots of sites which are stocked. And it downloads quickly!

  • Why not try using a regular flatbed scanner? Scan each section of the tape, and write some code to read it?

    It's a magnetic tape, not punched tape. Hole-punching was used only to mark bad spots.

  • UNIVAC I (Score:3)

    by Animats ( 122034 ) on Saturday March 31, 2001 @09:51AM (#325593) Homepage
    That was a cool machine.

    I still have a UNIVAC I tape: steel, 50BPI, 8 track (6 data, 1 parity, 1 clock). Not metal powder on plastic, a ribbon of steel. Bad spots had to be manually located and marked by punching two holes, one on either side of the bad spot. This medium was still usable on a UNIVAC 1107 as late as 1968. I wish I could read the thing; it has some of my undergrad work on it.

    I actually saw a UNIVAC I at Case Tech in operation when I had a tour of the place as a kid. And I once found a scrapped UNIVAC I console and tape drives in a surplus store in Washington, D.C. The tape drives used McIntosh tube audio amps to drive the huge reel motors, and those were valuable to the junk dealer. So were the big banks of electrolytic capacitors. The rest, sadly, was useless.

  • What ever happened to the ... royalty-free alternative to GIF?

    It's called PNG [freesoftware.com] now. Burn all GIFs [burnallgifs.org]; use PNG.

  • "ENIAC got the glory. UNIVAC went to work" and look where we are. Calculators that can do the same work a computer that took scientists massive spaces and long years to make. It's kind of scary in a way.
  • Seeing as the linux kernel can only be compiled on a 286 and above (as far as I know) I don't think it has been done yet. Then again, OpenBSD might have done it... They might not be linux, but they've done pretty much everything.

  • There, a steel UNIVAC control panel, bolted to a desktop and mounted with switches marked "gamma prime" and "overdrive," and flashing lights, sits near a mock-up of the company's latest mainframe workhorse, the ES7000, a powerful multi-processor network server that runs the Microsoft Windows operating system.

    So, what you are trying to tell us, is that the companies latest mainframe doesn't run much faster than the original UNIVAC, right?

  • Imagine a Beowulf cluster of these!

    hmmm, when you think about it, that might not be such a great idea...

    D

    Mad Scientists with too much time on thier hands

  • To the larger culture (great unwashed masses? ;-) of today, "computer" and "Microsoft" are pretty much synonymous.

    Some of us still remember when the public synonym for "computer" was "IBM machine" (and IBM did have an O/S called "DOS" before uSoft was a gleam in Billy's eye ;-).

    A shrinking minority of us still remember when "UNIVAC machine" was the standard pubref for "computer", and Walter Cronkite stood in front of a UNIVAC box on live TV as CBS made early attempts to do live, evening-of-election-day results forecasts.

  • Believe it or not, but at the main radar center for Buffalo they are using a 50 year old UNIVAC. They work by the motto "if isn't broke, don't fix it."

    And from what I was told, that location was one of the most "advanced."

    The only scary thing about the whole place what the fact that in the machine room there was a pc running windows 3.1!

  • candles? (Score:3)

    by byrd77 ( 171150 ) on Saturday March 31, 2001 @08:10AM (#325601) Homepage
    shouldn't we blow out 50 vacuum tubes to celebrate?
    granted, difficult to setup, but oh the excution...

  • The old Adage is that life on the Net is like living life in Dog Years.

    Univac = 50 years old. 50 x 7 = 350 dog years.

    Y'know, the Univac is not doing bad for something invented in the internet equivalent of 1650.

    ;-)

    [For those not USian, the folk adage is that one year in a dogs life is equivalent to 7 years in the life of a human. Thus the term "Dog Years". Internet development time, etc has been seen as being very similar to this]

    Check out the Vinny the Vampire [clik.to] comic strip

  • ...and 2 days later (Score:5)

    by mrbuckles ( 201938 ) on Saturday March 31, 2001 @07:01AM (#325603)
    ...and 2 days later, electronic porn celebrates its 50th anniversary.
  • A couple of days ago on the Letterman show, Dave was talking about his computer. He said he had something called a UNIVAC at home.

    Now I know how funny that was.
  • They didn't really have the precise manufacturing processes to build Babbage's computers.

    Then again, Augusta Ada Lovelace was the world's first female programmer. Sweet!

  • Makes me wonder why more women aren't inspired into taking Computer Science.
  • My dad works for Unisys, for the most part they just release new operating systems. But, they are coming out with a server that uses 32 pentium chips.es7000 [unisys.com]. They used intel chips so it will run win2000. Sick isn't it?
  • Fifty years ago this Saturday, the U.S. Census Bureau took custody of the world's first computer designed for commercial use: the Universal Automatic Computer, better known as UNIVAC.

    The introduction of the UNIVAC is "usually regarded as the beginning of the computer industry . . . it was really the first computer where they said 'computer for sale.

    The computer covered at least 352 square feet of floor space and came with more than a dozen desk- or refrigerator-size and smartly named peripherals: Uniservos, Uniprinters, Unitypers. The garage-size central processing unit ran at a then-astronomical clock rate of 2.25 megahertz.

  • For what I know, still in the 80s many Personal/Home computers (but not only!) were not able to go higher than 1Mhz.
    Maybe they have taken the wrong unit? 2.25Khz seems far more probable for 50s...
  • Right but AFAIK in 1978 even maiframe didn't go very far from the 20Mhz.

    It seems strange that in 27 (!!!) years clock speed increased only by a factor of ten.
  • The UNIVAC is celebrating it's 50th anniversary.
    I can't picture that beast celebrating anything. Hasn't it been mothballed/dismantled? Besides, what does one buy for an aged computer's anniversary? Vacuum tubes?

    If you love God, burn a church!
  • And then theres the ASCII version of goatse.cx.......
  • The first computer designed and built

    If the term 'all electronic' is left out then Konrad Zues's Z1 and Z2 computers beat UNIVAC by ten years.

  • Re:correction (Score:3)

    by Zeinfeld ( 263942 ) on Saturday March 31, 2001 @07:28AM (#325615) Homepage
    Babbage's engine was a theoretical exercise which was never actually built - at least at the time. It demanded engineering tolerances way beyond what was available back then.

    Actually the replica is built with tolerances easily obtainable at the time, the difference engine did not require tolerances any more demanding than a clock. The victorians were rather good at those.

    Babbage never completed because he was the first nerd, he kept redesigning the system and would never commit the design to manufacture. What Babbage needed was a PHB to kick his ass and force him to meet a ship date.

    The article is still incorrect however, the ENIAC was only completed after the war. The Bletchley park machines were completed long before that, in time to actually be of use.

    Mind you probably not surprising for an article that is probably written strraight from a corposate PR piece for UNISYS.

    BTW anyone know what UNISYS do these days? Are they just a glorified consultant shop? Do they actually have a product?

  • Sophisticated? A pyramid is basically a pile of stones. You don't need sophisticated analyses to build one, you just need a good quarry, a large workforce and a lot of patience. The fact that the pyramids were oriented pretty accurately to true north is impressive, but you don't need any particularly sophisticated computing techniques to do that either. All you need is the ability to build a wall that's level and a segment of a circle, and to find the center of the circle. Then, you need a plumb bob, some string and patience... Even the cathedrals of the 11th & 12th centuries were designed and built without mathematics more sophisticated than what you learn in a 9th-grade geometry course. Just because our culture can't conceive of engineering without dressing it in ten tons of academic drag doesn't mean that the builders of ancient times had to do things our way.
  • How about the first digital computer. Would that be accurate?

    --

  • It amazes me how people ignore pre 20th century computing.

    You know, I heard once that the design of the ancient Egyption pyramids was so sophisticated that the Egyptions probably had to use some kind of fairly sophisticated mechanical computing device. While records of the exact sort of technology they used haven't survived, it is fascinating to think that computers were used such a long time ago. It really makes you think.

  • You don't need sophisticated analyses to build one, you just need a good quarry, a large workforce and a lot of patience.

    It's amazing the lengths that people will go to to prove that the ancients were so much less sophisticated than ourselves.

    You don't need sophisticated analyses to build one, you just need a good quarry, a large workforce and a lot of patience[...]All you need is the ability to build a wall that's level and a segment of a circle, and to find the center of the circle. Then, you need a plumb bob, some string and patience...

    The thing is if you have the know-how to do all that, you have the technology to build a rudimentary mechanical computer.

    Even the cathedrals of the 11th & 12th centuries were designed and built without mathematics more sophisticated than what you learn in a 9th-grade geometry course.

    I'm not trying to be disagreeable here, but you do realize that the pyramids are far, far older than those cathedrals, don't you? And certainly, many, many, many times more massive. Have you ever been to Egypt? The sheer size of them makes European architecture seem like child's play. To visit those monstrous "piles of stone", as you call them, is a profoundly humbling experience.

  • If memory serves me, conrad zuse was an engineer who was rescued from having to go and fight in the russian front in wwII because of his engineering abilities and friends in high places. He made a programmable calculator. Which may have been used for buzz bombs guidance systems.
  • Yes, a lot of machines were built for military purposes. The foremost engineer at Bletchley Park was mr. Turing. ...diverging for just a moment, all post von newman architecture seems like an ugly mess compared to the mathematical simplicity of the Turing machine. Check out 180 [180sw.com] maybe turing is making a comeback.

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