ENIAC is often accused of being the world's first computer. It wasn't first (that honor now goes to Alan Turing's Colossus, developed in secret at Bletchley Park), nor was it a computer (it didn't have storage for program instructions; the machine had to be hard wired prior to each calculation). During the construction of ENIAC, the team realized that rewiring the computer was a tedious task. They decided that a better designed machine would have memory for both data and instructions.
One of the members of the ENIAC project wrote up these thoughts in a "draft report" of this new computer design. This report was circulated shortly after it was written in 1945; in 1946, the designers presented a series of lectures on the ideas contained in this report. Many mathematicians from the US and UK attended these lectures, which led to a series of research and commercial computer designs through the 1950s.
Question 1: (10 pts)
What was the name of this report that spawned the computing industry?Question 2: (10 pts)
Who was the author of this report?Question 3: (20 pts)
The machine described in this paper was built, eventually. Who built it and where?As always, no searching. Good luck!
Update: Boy, this was a tough question.
Q1: First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC. No points awarded.
Q2: John von Neumann was the author of this report. +10 to pdcawley
Q3: Maurice Wilkes built the EDSAC based on the draft design of von Neumann's EDVAC. Wilkes' machine was built at the University of Manchester, England.
Re:Pickiness I know...
ziggy on 2003-01-19T19:24:49
+10 on Question #2 for John von Neumann!Actually, if you want to be picky, you can craft a definition of "computer" that will either include or exclude Colossus. Although Colossus didn't have a von Neumann architecture (it didn't have any read/write memory to speak of), it did have an important property that ENIAC didn't. I'm rather certain that Colossus did read instructions and data from paper tape (at a rate of 30mph; it could spool tape at 60mph, but the paper tended to explode.) ENIAC on the other hand was programmed by reconfiguring the plugboards on the machine. This was the most significant failing of early "proto-computers" like ENIAC and the Harvard Mark I.
There are other reasons why Colossus isn't considered a computer, though. It didn't have "storage" per se, just a couple of read-only inputs for instructions and data and a write-only output. More importantly, Colossus and many of the early computers didn't even have a branch instruction. Most of the early computer designers were mathematicians and physicists; back then, the absolute importance of branching (and the evilness of self-modifying code) weren't very well understood.
Re:Pickiness I know...
pdcawley on 2003-01-20T09:08:25
I believe the paper tape was for input. Colossus was used for decoding Shark, which was a radio teletype system and I got the understanding that papertape was already in use as the storage for such things.
Maybe someone needs to find Tommy Flowers and buy him a few pints and get him to reminisce into a tape recorder...Re:Pickiness I know...
ziggy on 2003-01-20T15:01:05
Yes, but Colossus was programmable. Tommy Flowers or Tony Sale is on tape somewhere talking about how different radio operators would use different shortcuts in their transmission. If Bletchley knew who was transmitting a message, they could tune (er, program) Colossus to use a brute force cracking technique that looked for specific cribs in the input.I'm rather sure that Colossus wasn't programmable in the same sense as ENIAC was (recabling plugboards), and I think that it was programmable with paper tape. Alan Turing was one of its designers, after all...
