I have yet to see any proper technical
information on either ENIAC
or Colossus. Alas most of the technical-looking links
on the
currently-discussed ENIAC site go pages whre you have to be an IEEE
member to go further.
You might like this page:
http://ftp.arl.army.mil/~mike/comphist/46eniac-report/index.html
Thanks, I will take a look.
But I was under the impression that neither, in
their original form,
were stored-program machines
True.
and that to me would seem to be one criterion for
defining 'computer'
One could even get into the definition of stored program. ENIAC's
program was in the form of patch cables until a later revision allowed
for stored-in-memory programs.
When was this stored-program (in the normal sense) system added? Before
or after other stored-program machines such as EDSAC Manchester Mk1, etc?
And what di the patch cables do? If they were some kind of addressqable
'ROM' that was somehow sequenced, then I would consider that ot be a
stored program. If they are interconecting logic blocks (adders,
registers, etc) then I most probbly wouldn't
As an aside, there were several projects in electronics magazines over
here in the 1970s to make a pocket calculator 'programamble'. Typically
they ahad a small RAM, the otuptus of which were used to simulate
keypresses on the calcualtor. The better ones had some kind of
conditional (often dtecting the -ve sign or the position of the decimal
point in the display. My view is that the calcuaotr with this kuldge is a
stored-program comptuer, without it, it isn;'t. So going ban to ENIAC, it
may well have been modified int oa computer at some point, but this
doesn't mean it was a computer at the start.
I do not, however, dispute the imprtance of ENIAC...
-tony