[Leica] Some artifacts at the Computer History Museum #2

[photo at frozenlight.eu (Nathan Wajsman)]

Fascinating, both the technological and social aspects you touch on. Thanks!

I really regret not visiting the museum during our trip to California in 
August/September.

Cheers,
Nathan

Nathan Wajsman
Alicante, Spain
http://www.frozenlight.eu
http://www.greatpix.eu
PICTURE OF THE WEEK: http://www.fotocycle.dk/paws
Blog: http://nathansmusings.wordpress.com/

YNWA









On Jan 10, 2013, at 7:16 AM, Herbert Kanner wrote:

> 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.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
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