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Digital Hardware Technology

Researchers Found the Manual For the World's Oldest Surviving Computer (engadget.com) 74

Posted by BeauHD from the lost-and-found dept.
Researchers will be able to gain a deeper understanding of what's considered the world's oldest surviving (digital) computer after its long-lost user manual was unearthed. Engadget reports: The Z4, which was built in 1945, runs on tape, takes up most of a room and needs several people to operate it. The machine now takes residence at the Deutsches Museum in Munich, but it hasn't been used in quite some time. An archivist at ETH Zurich, Evelyn Boesch, discovered the manual among her father's documents in March, according to retired lecturer Herbert Bruderer. Rene Boesch worked with the Swiss Aeronautical Engineering Association, which was based at the university's Institute for Aircraft Statics and Aircraft Construction. The Z4 was housed there in the early 1950s.

Among Boesch's documents were notes on math problems the Z4 solved that were linked to the development of the P-16 jet fighter. "These included calculations on the trajectory of rockets, on aircraft wings, on flutter vibrations [and] on nosedive," Bruderer wrote in a Association of Computing Machinery blog post.
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Researchers Found the Manual For the World's Oldest Surviving Computer More

Researchers Found the Manual For the World's Oldest Surviving Computer

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  • Attention Millennials (Score:5, Funny)

    by Arthur, KBE ( 6444066 ) on Wednesday September 23, 2020 @08:48PM (#60538450)
    That's the Digital Equipment Corporation logo.

    • Re:Attention Millennials (Score:5, Funny)

      by backslashdot ( 95548 ) on Wednesday September 23, 2020 @09:00PM (#60538500)

      If you don't know what that is just altavista it.

    • Re:Attention Millennials (Score:5, Informative)

      by DontBeAMoran ( 4843879 ) on Wednesday September 23, 2020 @09:43PM (#60538664)

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]

      That's a company logo you used above, it's not a generic "DIGITAL vs ANALOG" thing.

      Using the DEC logo for things "digital" is as stupid as using the "Honda" logo when talking about Japan or the Hormel logo when talking about food.

      • But what about the Hormel SPAM logo when talking about...

        • The bit about Hormel was that SPAM should not be classified as "food".

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by beep54 ( 1844432 )
          For years, maybe 12, we here in Austin had the Spamorama dedicated to all things Spam. The highlight was the cooking contest, which could get decidely interesting. The Italian restaraunt I worked entered Spam ravioli with marsala sauce which was delicious. Then, suddenly Hormel told us to stop. Which was incredibly stupid as the whole event was free advertising for Spam.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Tablizer ( 95088 )

        I used to use DEC minicomputers. For the most part they were quite practical and straightforward. The designers thought things out well and seemed to have a lot of real-world experience. They deserve kudos.

        If they had only been quicker to make them communicate well with PC's and opened up the hardware side, they could have been a big LAN/WAN player.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by tlhIngan ( 30335 )

        Using the DEC logo for things "digital" is as stupid as using the "Honda" logo when talking about Japan or the Hormel logo when talking about food.

        Except, Honda and Hormel are trademarks. The DEC logo lost trademark status decades ago when DEC ceased to exist and became a part of Compaq (which became HP, and well...).

        And really, it's been used everywhere now, from Chinese electronic geegaws to music production equipment.

    • We point it out every time but they don't fucking listen.

    • You know millennials are old enough to have been around when DEC was a thing right? Maybe you need to re-evaluate which generation you're blaming for ignorance.

      • As one of "those" (i guess some people are just predisposed to thinking in terms of spherical cows), I remember well their acquisition by Compaq, as well as seeing at least one instance of NT running on an Alpha machine. Then again, I was one of those kids who liked reading through the computer hardware catalogs for fun, so this experience might not be typical.
    • You want to know me better Then do not wait and copy the link and call me. Just be =>> https://kutt.it/2H1qPB [kutt.it]

  • I'm just wondering, how do you lose the manual for something like this?

    Been around plenty of mainframe installs. Seen plenty of IBM/DEC manual sets that appeared to weigh more than an adult human, which were always nearby.

    This was one of the first computers on the planet. Not exactly something known to people.

    How the hell the manual wasn't chained to this thing (and thus moved with it), is beyond me. How exactly did anyone else other than maybe the creator, operate the damn thing without it?

    • Re:HOW do you lose...the manual? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by neilo_1701D ( 2765337 ) on Wednesday September 23, 2020 @09:50PM (#60538682)

      I'm just wondering, how do you lose the manual for something like this?

      ...

      How the hell the manual wasn't chained to this thing (and thus moved with it), is beyond me. How exactly did anyone else other than maybe the creator, operate the damn thing without it?

      The clue to your answer is in the story. The machine was invented under the Nazi regime. Finding paperwork to anything after the end of the war would have been a nightmare. Consider that the US swooped in and took everything that looked like rocketry, and the Russian took a whole bunch more. Also, the Z4 was moved to a barn to wait out the war.

      • Unlike the grimoires in Diskworld, the manuals for early computers don't need to be chained down.

        Back in those days manuals weren't churned out by the thousand, they were more like a loose leaf binder containing the latest version of hundreds of separate documents.(*) I would assume that when they were decomissioning the computer someone took a copy, possibly the only copy, home as a souvenir. Probably a good thing as otherwise it could have ended up being recycled as firelighters.

        (*) For the millennials,

    • I'm just wondering, how do you lose the manual for something like this?

      I can't imagine, but I will bet that there's a coffee stain somewhere on this manual. At least one.

    • Re:HOW do you lose...the manual? (Score:4, Funny)

      by bugs2squash ( 1132591 ) on Thursday September 24, 2020 @12:19AM (#60539010)
      The software was so well written it was considered self-documenting

    • I'm just wondering, how do you lose the manual for something like this?

      Don't know; how did they lose the WMDs?

    • "Working software over comprehensive documentation." Thats how.

      • "Working software over comprehensive documentation." Thats how.

        A lot of clueless men, spent a lot of pointless time, moving the worlds most expensive paperweight around.

        The article reads like this machine is so complex we hardly understand it today. Starting to wonder what anyone actually did with this thing after it was drug out of a barn half a century ago, presumably sans manual. No wonder it ended up in a museum shortly thereafter.

        Yeah, sometimes documentation can be even more important.

    • Look at when this was built, in Germany in 1945 in the closing days of WWII. It's both astounding that it was built at all, even more astounding that it survived, and not surprising that parts of it were lost. Look at the Chiemsee Cauldron [artnet.com], which no-one even knew existed until its rediscovery more than half a century later.

    • "Been around plenty of mainframe installs. Seen plenty of IBM/DEC manual sets that appeared to weigh more than an adult human, which were always nearby."

      I remember early computers and software always came with half a ton of manuals.
      I have an unopened, shrink-wrapped copy of dBASE III+ that weighs around 15 pounds and it's 1 diskette or 2.

  • The document, duh (Score:5, Informative)

    by greytree ( 7124971 ) on Wednesday September 23, 2020 @09:45PM (#60538666)

    Here's the link to the actual document, that Slashdot's genius editor somehow forgot to include in the post:

    https://m-cacm.acm.org/system/... [acm.org]

  • RTFM (Score:5, Funny)

    by inode_buddha ( 576844 ) on Wednesday September 23, 2020 @09:46PM (#60538670) Journal

    I'll bet this will be the *first* time somebody will actually RTFM

  • ENIAC (Score:5, Informative)

    by mspohr ( 589790 ) on Wednesday September 23, 2020 @10:06PM (#60538728)

    ENIAC (/niæk/; Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer)[1][2] was the first electronic general-purpose digital computer.[3] It was Turing-complete, and able to solve "a large class of numerical problems" through reprogramming.[4][5]

    Although ENIAC was designed and primarily used to calculate artillery firing tables for the United States Army's Ballistic Research Laboratory (which later became a part of the Army Research Laboratory),[6][7] its first program was a study of the feasibility of the thermonuclear weapon.[8][9]

    ENIAC was completed in 1945 and first put to work for practical purposes on December 10, 1945.[10]

    ENIAC was formally dedicated at the University of Pennsylvania on February 15, 1946 and was heralded as a "Giant Brain" by the press.[11] It had a speed on the order of one thousand times faster than that of electro-mechanical machines; this computational power, coupled with general-purpose programmability, excited scientists and industrialists alike. The combination of speed and programmability allowed for thousands more calculations for problems, as ENIAC calculated a trajectory in 30 seconds that took a human 20 hours (allowing one ENIAC hour to displace 2,400 human hours).[12] The completed machine was announced to the public the evening of February 14, 1946 and formally dedicated the next day at the University of Pennsylvania, having cost almost $500,000 (approximately $7,150,000 in 2020 dollars; inflation-adjusted). It was formally accepted by the U.S. Army Ordnance Corps in July 1946. ENIAC was shut down on November 9, 1946 for a refurbishment and a memory upgrade, and was transferred to Aberdeen Proving Ground, Maryland in 1947. There, on July 29, 1947, it was turned on and was in continuous operation until 11:45 p.m. on October 2, 1955.

    • There, on July 29, 1947, it was turned on and was in continuous operation until 11:45 p.m. on October 2, 1955.

      The word "continuous" might need a little pushback. That thing had something like 18,000 tubes in it and those would burn out regularly, requiring constant replacement.

      • Tubes would burn out on a regular basis, but the problem was that tubes did not burn out regularly. Thus, finding the individual tubes that had burned out was more work.

        • Old wives tale - tubes donâ(TM)t burn out easily.

          • They do if you switch them on/off often. One of the innovations in Colossus, IIRC, was to leave the tubes powered on continuously instead of power cycling them.

          • Old wives tale - tubes don't burn out easily.

            Old wife here. Thermionic valves did achieve a fairly remarkable degree of reliability by the '60s and it was common for a TV set to be able to run for years before needing service. Yet I recall that TV repairmen were always busy and most drug stores I visited had a tube testing station. The MTBF for a tube was around 5,000 hours, so spread that across a suburb-full of TV sets would mean several TVs every day would fail.

            Likewise, the MTBF of the tubes that Eniac was using meant they would have some fa

      • There, on July 29, 1947 [wikipedia.org], it was turned on and [...]

        Coincidence?

    • They key is how exactly you define "computer." If it's something that computes, then the Z4 qualifies. If it is necessary that the computer be practically Turing complete and fully general, then the Z4 does not.
      • Even the Z3 was later demonstrated to be Turing complete (modulo the obvious problems of finite memory), so I doubt that Z4 was any worse.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Uecker ( 1842596 )

        I wonder how "practically Turing complete" the ENIAC really was. Considering that programming originally resembled more like programming a FPGA, i.e. connecting functional units by wires.

        In any case, already the Z3 was already amazing machine, binary representation, fully programmable, floating point (!), ...

        • I wonder how "practically Turing complete" the ENIAC really was.

          It was intentionally Turing complete. The people who built it spent a lot of time reading Turing's writings.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by Uecker ( 1842596 )

            Do you have a reference? It is a while ago I had looked into the literature, but I do not think that Turing-completeness was really an design goal of ENIAC. Essentially ENIAC was a set of electronic compute components which could be wired together. The fact that it was fast meant that programs could not come from tape, which is a huge disadvantage and meant that everything had to be wired in a cumbersome way. But then this meant that people at the flexibility to look into new ways how to do programming, and

            • George Dyson wrote about it at length in his book, "Turing's Cathedral."

              • Re: (Score:2)

                by Uecker ( 1842596 )

                Thanks.This sounds interesting, I will read it. So I found only the following comment in a book review published in Notices of the AMS:

                >>Given the title and cover of Dyson’s narrative, a reader might expect Turing to be an essential character for the story inside. Instead, Dyson largely confines his discussion of Turing to the thirteenth of eighteen chapters. In it, we learn that “Engineers avoided Turing’s paper because it appeared entirely theoretical.”

                • In it, we learn that “Engineers avoided Turing’s paper because it appeared entirely theoretical.”

                  I don't remember that particular quote, but Princeton's advanced institute was filled with theoretical mathematicians and researchers, including Einstein, Godel, and Von Neumann. And they did read it carefully.

          • ENIAC was a digital embodiment of an analog computer. It was NOT "intentionally Turing complete", in fact, it was the exact opposite. It was made of functional blocks wired together simulating operational amplifiers and such. Its designers realized the deficiencies of this approach even as they were building it and few years later later someone had the idea of wiring them in a specific fixed way that, when some other new units were added, could process a sequential program. But that was after other Turing-c

    • ENIAC (/niæk/; Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer)[1][2] was the first electronic general-purpose digital computer

      The Z4 was electric, not electronic. Apart from the lack of thermionic valves, the Z4 was actually much more sophisticated than ENIAC despite predating it. It's binary not decimal (well BCD), and has, for example 32 bit binary floating point complete with inf, nan and exceptions. The machine also had an instruction pipeline (this was pioneered in Zuse's Z1).

      Make no mistake t

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by khb ( 266593 )

      Weren't the Brits a year earlier? https://www.britannica.com/tec... [britannica.com]

  • How big is the memory? (Score:4, Funny)

    by Z80a ( 971949 ) on Wednesday September 23, 2020 @10:07PM (#60538732)

    Can you run doom on it?

  • can you (Score:3)

    by bugs2squash ( 1132591 ) on Thursday September 24, 2020 @12:24AM (#60539020)
    Imagine a Beowulf cluster of these

  • Page 1 (Score:3)

    by taylorius ( 221419 ) on Thursday September 24, 2020 @03:26AM (#60539332) Homepage

    Hast thou tvrned it off, then once more on?

  • An archivist at ETH Zurich, Evelyn Boesch, discovered the manual among her father's documents in March

    At least *one* good thing has come from everyone being stuck at home due to covid19...

  • Manuals for computers thrown out years ago not only don't get lost, they're hard to avoid. At least that's how it is in my house.

  • The editors of Slashdot are so detached from the history of computing, that they use Digital Equipment Corporation's logo for generic 'digital' things.

    And this is not the first time or the only icon to be used that way.

    I wrote about it with examples on my web site [baheyeldin.com].

    • If you click the image, it links to search by filter; there you can see the first 49 pages (limit, shows as far back as late 2018, though this predates that by far) of stories tagged, basically none of which have anything to do with the company. I wonder how far back that trend actually continues...

  • Good luck finding the manuals for anything built today in the far future.

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