15 Oct
2007
15 Oct
'07
3:22 p.m.
On Tue, 16 Oct 2007 12:49:27 am Graham Toal wrote:
Here's a very interesting 1951 paper on the
construction of a complex
boolean logic unit using relays. It's contemporary with the more
better-known Kalin-Burkhart machine.
http://history.dcs.ed.ac.uk/archive/docs/mechanized_reasoning_screenres.pdf
This is the first time this paper has been put online. I received it
as a photocopy of the original from J B Smith's sister.
This is at screen resolution. I'll post a higher-res version later
for printing. (I had to clean up the paper considerably from the
original using Photoshop.)
If you're interested in the history of logic machines, you should also
look for machines by Alfred Smee (1851), and William Stanley Jevons
(1870)
Graham
References:
http://www.google.com/search?source=ig&hl=en&channel=2PSP&q=Kal…
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&safe=active&q=%22mechanized+reas…
+McCallum+Smith
Now THIS is interesting! I love the idea of a computer that's actually
designed to compute, as opposed to playing games on or getting annoyed at.
If you have any more documents like it I'd love to hear about them. Do you
have anything about analogue computing?
Thanks,
Alexis.