Edsac Goes Live, At UK's National Museum of Computing 37
Rambo Tribble (1273454) writes "Britain's National Museum of Computing has flipped the switch on the venerable Edsac computer. The arduous task of reconstructing the 1949 behemoth, fraught with little in terms of the original hardware or documentation, was brought to fruition on Wednesday. As project lead Andrew Herbert is quoted as saying, "We face the same challenges as those remarkable pioneers who succeeded in building a machine that transformed computing." A remarkably shaky video of the event, replete with excellent views of the floor at the videographer's feet, can be found here."
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space: V2 missiles: WAR!
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Space did not exist until the Soviets discovered it in 1957.
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Nah, space isn't for silly things like computers - it's for important things like non-stick frying pans and biros that write upside down*.
(The comms satellites, GPS, remote sensing and general coolness of landing robots on comets and stuff might count for something, too)
* Don't bother with the snopes links - I'm being silly.
Fraught? (Score:1, Insightful)
So, the word 'fraught' doesn't appear in TFA. And there's probably a reason for that.
Fraught doesn't mean "without the benefit of".
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Whatever Merriam-Webster may say, I've never seen fraught used with something good or desirable.
Fraught with danger - yes.
Fraught with a ton of burgers, a case of beer, and more minge than you could shake a stick at - no.
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It's 512 words, not bytes. Each word was over two bytes long. Memory was word-addressable.
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Each word was over two bytes long.
True, each 18 bit word was a little over three bytes long - the EDSAC used 5 bit characters.
A byte is the amount of memory used to store a character, not 8 bits.
aw, c'mon coach, put in the mercury! (Score:2)
just don't vacuum up the spills, let the kiddies roll it around in their palms like we did. probably be a more efficient way to pick it up.
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Alternatively, they could use alcohol - Turing calculated that ethyl alcohol could be used in delay lines when he was designing the ACE.
His colleagues suggested he wanted to fill them with gin.
Safer and much cheaper than mercury.
These guys rule (Score:4, Insightful)
The Colossus and Bombe replicas were amazing achievements, and they just keep going. Building complex machines with nothing but some photographs to go on.
Where's my 'we're not worthy' emoticon? _o_
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Actually, there are real people still alive who remember it.
Not working yet (Score:4, Informative)
It's not finished yet. They have the clock and the delay line memory working, but it can't run programs.
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Then as now (Score:1)