Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 2013/01/09
[Author Prev] [Author Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Author Index] [Topic Index] [Home] [Search]This story is about a computer called Univac. It was the first computer sold commercial in this country; the first purchase made by the U.S. Census Bureau. The picture is of its console, one of the more spectacular consoles around. Here is some background. During World War II, the army had a bunch of women math majors calculating ballistics tables for artillery. The work couldn't keep up with the demand, and two guys named John Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert, at the University of Pennsylvania Moore School of Electrical Engineering, proposed building an "electronic brain" to do these computations. It wasn't a programmable computer in today's sense; you programmed it by how you connected various panels together--basically you rewired the room. The thing had seventeen thousand vacuum tubes. Some of these women that I mentioned above were hired to figure out the rewiring. This was a formidable task; they had to start by studying the logic diagrams of the device and went on from there. Ironically (sign of the age), when the war was over, military secrecy abandoned, and the thing shown to the press, these women were totally concealed and ignored. All honors went to the male engineers. In a very valid sense, this machine, called ENIAC, was the legitimate ancestor of today's computers. When military secrecy ended, the Moore School held an internationally attended seminar on computer design, one in which some basic ideas were formulated. John Von Neumann wrote a summary paper on those ideas which his secretary unfortunately distributed all around the world, the result being that Von Neumann got erroneously credited with the basic design ideas; computers were said to have the "Von Neumann architecture". Here is the direct connection between ENIAC and conventionally programmable computers. Several of the panels of the ENIAC were called "function tables". They had row upon row of ten-position switches into which the values of a table, e.g. logarithms, could be set. John von Neumann, the famous mathematician, working at Los Alamos on the hydrogen bomb, heard about the ENIAC and wondered if it could help in the calculations he was organizing. Somehow, the idea arose that maybe the machine could be wired in such a way that a program (instead of a mathematical function) could be put into a function table and the machine wired up to obey any such program. The idea worked. It slowed down the machine by about a factor of six but made the execution of more complex programs feasible and cut immensely the programming time. The machine was actually used then for calculations on the hydrogen bomb. Eckert and Mauchly went on to found the company that made the Univac. In addition to the Census Bureau, early models were bought by the Pentagon and the Atomic Energy Commission. The company was eventually bought by Remington Rand and ultimately became Sperry-Rand. http://gallery.leica-users.org/v/herbk1/L1002780.jpg.html I also throw in for your entertainment a few detail shots of the Babbage Difference Engine. http://gallery.leica-users.org/v/herbk1/L1002717-2.jpg.html http://gallery.leica-users.org/v/herbk1/L1002720-2.jpg.html http://gallery.leica-users.org/v/herbk1/L1002716-2.jpg.htmlr Herbert Kanner kanner at acm.org 650-326-8204 Question authority and the authorities will question you.