23 Jun
2003
23 Jun
'03
12:42 a.m.
I was channel flipping and came across a movie on The
Disney Channel where
a guy was standing in front of the front panel of a computer with tape
drives spinning in the background. He was doing some demonstration for
three men, pushing buttons and flipping switches on the front panel and
then the computer was spitting out results on punch card from the front
(this part was fake). At first I thought it was a recent film. I thought
the tape drives looked very authentic, because their movement was very
real. Then I looked at the front panel and saw "Siemens System 4004", and
was quite surprised.
It turns out the movie is "Willy Wonka and the
Chocolate Factory". The
last time I saw this was probably 15 years ago.
The Siemens System 4004 is very interesting in this
context. According to
Hans, it is the first fully transistorized digital computer, beating out
even the MIT TX-0. The Austrian Mail?fterl also vies for the title, but
Hans Franke claims it wasn't fully completed or something:
Well, I hate to correct you in public, Sallam, but there's a litte
numbertwist. The first one was the 2002 from the mid 50s. The 4004
series (2002 was just one model, and the 3003 as followup also),
was rather a plain /360 ripoff Siemens bought from RCA (and thus
getting on the compatibility train, and yeah, already 30 years ago
the idea of saveing money by buying instead of developing your own
technology, even if you've been a leader before), just to learn that
RCA stoped producing them - so Siemens restarted their development
and kame whithin less than a year with a bunch of clones and there
after from scratch designed models ... leading eventualy to the X
and Z CPUs which are in my mind the best ever ISA 24 Bit CPUs...
including extensions for two kinds of list managements on ISA level.
One was supposed to be a stack, while the other has been some kind
of address indirection, at the same time aiming to support a stack
and high level languages like LISP etc.
Long talk, short result, in the 80s all these nice extensions got
canned again in favour to IBM compatibility.
http://www.museumonline.at/2000/wien-feuerbach/mailueft/mailueft_de.htm
http://www.heise.de/tp/deutsch/inhalt/co/5163/1.html
A quick Google search turned up a computer that I was
not previously aware
of:
This is the TRADIC (TRAnsistorized DIgital Computer)
built by Bell Labs.
If the year is correct, I believe this is a contender for the title.
In contrast to the 2002 it's been just a single unit and rather specialized.
Here's a couple pages on the Siemens 4004:
Maybe take a look at the pages of the Deutsches Museum pages and
see the 2002 in a panoramic view (quicktime required)
http://www.deutsches-museum.de/mum/panorama/big/e_siemen.htm
Now, if the resuution would be better, you'd see a little burn
mark at the operators table - we had the culprit as a speaker
at VCFe this year :)
Beside the 2002 a TR4, a Cray (behind the 7074) and a /360 is
show (behind the 360 the remains of the PERM are on display).
Even whit the less than superior display of smaler machinery
(shamefuly hidden behind the TR4 :) there's a Z4
http://www.deutsches-museum.de/mum/panorama/big/zuse.htm
and a Univac - note the quite unique view from inside:
http://www.deutsches-museum.de/mum/panorama/big/univac.htm
As some may know, I'm still not realy in favor for the way the
mordern parts of the computing exhibition has been displayed,
but nonetheless, the Deutsches Museum is worth several visits.
Gruss
H.
--
VCF Europa 5.0 am 01./02. Mai 2004 in Muenchen
http://www.vcfe.org/