23 Jan
2011
23 Jan
'11
9:59 a.m.
[...]
The fact that Colossus was purpose-built and served to
decipher codes shoul=
d not take away from the importance of its design. It was possibly as 'pro=
Whether or not a device is important (and I will happily agree that both
Colossus and ENIAC are historically and socially importnat) has nothing
whatsoever to do with whether it's a computer.
grammable' as the ENIAC, but the scope of
programming development was somew=
hat limited by fear of annihilation at the hands of the Nazi regime. One m=
ust wonder what would have become of it had its destruction not been ordere=
d and its very existence declared a state secret. =20
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. But I was under the impression that neither, in
their original form, were stored-program machines, and that to me would
seem to be one criterion for defining 'computer'
-tony