7 Sep
2005
7 Sep
'05
5:41 p.m.
On Mon, 05 Sep 2005 22:04:11 -0400
"Jerome H. Fine" <jhfinexgs2 at compsys.to> wrote:
I was told that one of the first programs that EDSAC ran printed out a
table of integers and their squares. This did not impess other academics
at Cambridge very much, because squaring was fairly easy to do on an
analogue machine (so why bother with the more complicated digital ones?)
The second prgoram printed out a list of prime numbers. Other people were
impressed. Doing that was very difficult on an analogue computer, so here
was something the digital machine could do that the analogue one couldn't.
-tony
First of all, the reason is "FOR FUN",
the most practical of all
reasons.
Of course! A prime number generator is always one of the first programs
I code up on a new machine. A 'benchmark' of sorts.