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From an authoritative source -- 60-year-old computer loses race
From: David Farber <dave () farber net>
Date: Mon, 19 Nov 2007 09:32:21 -0500
Begin forwarded message: From: Brian Randell <Brian.Randell () ncl ac uk> Date: November 19, 2007 8:51:22 AM EST To: Charles Pinneo <pinneo () sbcglobal net> Cc: dave () farber net Subject: Re: [IP] Re: 60-year-old computer loses race Charlie:
What's interesting to me about Colossus is how the English see the history of computers in a different light than Americans see it due to national chauvinistic rationalizations and also as affected by how you define "computer." For example, Americans who don't know much about computer history, might see Univac as the first computer, whereas the British might see Colossus as the first computer. Or the French might place more importance on Jacquard's Punched Cards. It's all how you look at it from a nationalistic point of view.
Aside from nationalism, the way I put it is that if you add enough adjectives, anything can be identified as "first". (And issues of primacy are not really as important as issues of influence.)
FWIW, to my mind the first operational practical electronic stored program computer was the Cambridge EDSAC - 1949
If you remove "practical" you identify the Manchester machine built to test the Williams tube memory, which worked first in 1948.
Then remove "stored program" and you get into arguments about degree of programmability, and in particular between ENIAC (1946) and Colossus (1943/4)
Then remove electronic and you get back to ZuseThen also remove operational and you get to Babbage - my other great hero.
:-)The situation with regard to the Colossus is complicated by issues of secrecy. I broke the first reasonably detailed news of the Colossus in the 1970s, after nearly 30 years of everyone assuming that the ENIAC was the first electronic computer. But now in Britain at least its fame is bound up with that of Bletchley Park, Alan Turing and (confusingly) Enigma.
The recent publicity has been engineered as part of a campaign to obtain funding for a museum at Bletchley Park.
In view of history, though, Colossus is far more important because if Colossus hadn't been used at Bletchley Park to defeat the Germans, we would all be speaking German.
Agreed, though that's a bit of an overstatement - I think military historians now accept that the work at Bletchley Park shortened the war by a couple of years - which of course is a fantastic achievement, and to have kept it all completely under wraps for 30 years is amazing.
Has the rebuilding of Colossus sparked more interest in the history of computing in England?
Certainly there's been quite a bit of publicity, but perhaps the general interest is more related to code-breaking than to computing.
I found this really neat YouTube movie clip about the rebuilding of Colossus. I'm sure you've seen it.
I hadn't - thanks for the heads-up.
I read The Second World War by Winston Churchill. I mailed it to my brother in Arizona and then he mailed it to my nephew (his son) in Florida. It's making the rounds in our family.
I don't get to spend much time on matters to do with computer history these days, but I count my publicising of Tommy Flowers' work on Colossus, and getting this University to award him an honorary doctorate as perhaps my proudest achievement, and my getting to see the cache of Babbage papers, including his fantastic unpublished 1837 manuscript "On the Mathematical Powers of the Calculating Engine", at the Oxford Museum of the History of Science, as one of my most exciting moments.
cheers Brian -- School of Computing Science, Newcastle University, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE1 7RU, UK EMAIL = Brian.Randell () ncl ac uk PHONE = +44 191 222 7923 FAX = +44 191 222 8232 URL = http://www.cs.ncl.ac.uk/~brian.randell/ ------------------------------------------- Archives: http://v2.listbox.com/member/archive/247/=now RSS Feed: http://v2.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/247/ Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
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- From an authoritative source -- 60-year-old computer loses race David Farber (Nov 19)