22 Jan
2011
22 Jan
'11
10:23 p.m.
On 2011 Jan 22, at 9:05 PM, Ian King wrote:
Oh boy, let's argue the "first computer"
question again....
This site promote the hoary old argument that the ABC wasn't really a
computer, but ENIAC was. From what I've read of both machines, the
ABC can't be seen to be less of a computer than ENIAC - although it
was certainly less successful. The argument of this website is that
the ABC was nothing more than a calculator. I would suggest that both
ABC and ENIAC were in fact computers of limited application, to wit,
the calculation of complex and repetitive arithmetic, and both were
originally designed for particular purposes. ENIAC was later
programmed for other arithmetic tasks, and perhaps that would have
been possible with the ABC as well - but history suggests that the ABC
just wasn't very well built (it didn't have federal dollars behind
it!) and was not as robust as one might hope. But robust and popular
or flaky and obscure, the factual history - not the mud-slinging
against documentarian Smiley for what may well have been sloppy
journalism - seems to suggest that the ABC was the first of the genre,
"electronic digital computer," as limited as those initial machines
were - all of them.
Yes, there is too much ABC bashing in there. They won't even allow the
ABC credit for what it did do, or fail to understand what it did.
They state: "It?s true that the ABC used vacuum tubes for counting, but
that concept was already established in other inventions such as ray
counters." The ABC did not use counters, one of it's most significant
accomplishments was that it broke from counter-based arithmetic to do
arithmetic with logic and gates.
The fact that Colossus was purpose-built and served to
decipher codes
should not take away from the importance of its design. It was
possibly as 'programmable' as the ENIAC, but the scope of programming
development was somewhat limited by fear of annihilation at the hands
of the Nazi regime. One must wonder what would have become of it had
its destruction not been ordered and its very existence declared a
state secret.
I looked into the Colossus claims of programmability a little, but was
not convinced, at least from the technical description I recall seeing.
There was some flexibility in there, but very limited compared to the
ENIAC.
I think ENIAC's overwhelming historical importance
was the
conversations it started. It was not an obscure project by a college
professor of physics nor a super-secret defense project (although it
did start out that way, it later became an 'open' secret), and its
significance was more about why it wasn't all it could be than what it
was. Von Neumann's observations would likely not have occurred
without the context of the ENIAC, nor would the interest in the
potential of information technology have been quite so stoked.
Are you referring to the 'stored program' 'observations'? I believe it
has been reasonably established that the stored program concept could
not be attributed to Von Neumann - that the concept either came out of
the group discussions for EDVAC and could not be attributed to
individuals, or that Eckert and Mauchly had already arrived at the
notion before Von Neumann's involvement.
I wonder how history would have been written if
Atanasoff had been
more interested in fame and fortune than in quantum physics, or if he
and Berry had been (or could have hired) better engineers.
The Eckstein citation on this site does not constitute scholarship,
just recursively poor journalism.
It's a shame this site diminishes an otherwise worthwhile goal of
celebrating the ENIAC by regurgitating an old, emotional and
unsupported argument. ENIAC was far more important to history, but
that does not mean we must disregard history that demonstrates it was
not first of its class. (First "general purpose" machine? Clearly
later, with EDSAC/EDVAC/UNIVAC, which were deliberately built by
principle to be computers and to subsequently fulfill specific roles
at the behest of their programmers.) -- Ian