#dinosaur talks

[dinosaurspen]

Don't cry, public access CTSS system at the Interim Computer Museum.

[dinosaurspen]

Combing through old DEC-related footage trying to scrape together enough for a sequel to this, and ran across an old trade show vid

" . . . oh my god, DECn Donuts?"

One frame later

"Oh my god, it's really DECn Donuts!"

[dinosaurspen]

Investigating whether anything is occurring in Philadelphia for ENIAC Day 80th anniversary and a friend showed me this website. It's not clear to me that anything is happening in-person, but I did find this

[dinosaurspen]

Result of today's in-laws' garage easter egg hunt: an Amiga, a Kaypro 2, some kind of a Mac, a looted SAGE piece, a box of TRS-80 documents. (+ Non computer things.)

The Mac & Amiga are in calamitous condition (spouse fished them from electronics recycling 15+ years ago) but I couldn't let them keep rotting in the garage...

[dinosaurspen]

Just two things: I'm not reading all that, and if you want to reblog any of my posts with paragraphs-long walls of chatgpt vomit don't.

[dinosaurspen]

Attempting a historical study of the early British electronic computers and it's making me want to invest in a corkboard, pins and strings to keep track of everything.

I've spent the last several days alone trying to get a straight answer on whether the Manchester Baby (and subsequently, Manchester Mark 1) was derived from the First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC / EDVAC itself.

I thought I read that Manchester received a copy of the report, though I don't have the source for that on hand so I'm not going to put too much weight on that. I'll update if I find it.

A representative working on behalf of Max Newman was present at the Moore School Lectures. Thus we know the Manchester team was at least exposed to design concepts from the EDVAC.

In Automatic Digital Computers (1956), Maurice Wilkes (inventor of the very-much-derived-from-the-First Draft EDSAC) offhandedly groups the Manchester computers together "with other machines of the EDVAC-type". Unclear to me is whether he's using that as shorthand for stored program computers, or pointing to a stronger thread of influence.

Finally, University of Manchester itself has this to say:

A second U.K. project, the Manchester Mark 1, was not directly influenced by the lectures, but Freddie Williams, while visiting a number of places in the US in June 1946, saw the ENIAC, and he was impressed at the evidence that such a large electronic machine could be kept error free for long enough to make useful calculations.

Followed by this a few paragraphs later:

Williams and Kilburn immediately wanted to develop a basic computer as the only way of fully testing their proposed storage mechanism. Tom Kilburn led the design and construction, and the "Small Scale Experimental Machine", the Manchester "Baby", was up and running by June 1948. Although small and primitive, it was the first working machine to have all the basic ingredients we would regard as essential to the von Neumann computer, in particular it had a true Random Access Memory and used the stored-program principle. The Baby so successfully demonstrated the effectiveness and potential of the von Neumann computer that Williams immediately embarked on developing the Baby into a full-sized usable machine, the Manchester Mark 1 [...]

Making the rather circular (IMO) case that the Baby / Mark 1 was both unrelated to the EDVAC, but related to the "von Neumann computer", which itself was the "idealized" form of the EDVAC laid out in the First Draft. (And yes, I know the reasoning for this is likely the IAS Machines using the same Williams Tube memory as the Manchester machines, but it's still weird to see it framed this way.) I feel like I'm going nuts, which is only bolstered by the ever-growing list of early British computer history books I'm compiling.

[dinosaurspen]

Digging around the Internet Archive looking at unfindable out of print books on early computing for a project I'm considering, when I ran across ...

"Wait, what's special about the SWAC, wasn't it just an early stored program computer?"

This is so funny to me, the author isn't coming out and saying SWAC is the first stored program computer, but there's definitely an implication of originality by tying it to modern PCs. I don't know how SWAC is more of a "why" for modern computing than EDVAC or IAS or Manchester Baby, or Whirlwind and the early MIT cohort for that matter if we're discussing functionality and not just architectural similarities (which have diverged anyway).

It seems straightforward that EDVAC and Manchester Baby have claim to the title of first stored program computer, depending on which you put more weight on, being started or completed.

First Draft Report on the EDVAC & IAS Machine certainly muddy the waters of "origins of modern computers" because that was the design that everyone & their mother copied. There's also EDSAC kicking around the field of nominees, because it's EDVAC finished before EDVAC...

But SWAC is such an out of left contender, I'm not sure what the connection is? If SWAC, why not SEAC, it was identical and completed a month earlier?

The paranoid part of my brain wonders if this is an attempt to locate the origins of modern computing in California to fit with the Silicon Valley tech mythos narrative, but I also don't want to say so because I have no evidence of that being the author's intent.

Maybe as a person who worked on SWAC he wanted an attention grabbing title for a project that's dear to him, but pointing out the correlation between SWAC & modern computers, not causality, would be the responsible way to go about that...

SIGH. My curiosity is piqued. Add another thing to the reading list!

[dinosaurspen]

My models are done, my poster is done, my 40s BRL costume is done, I'm ready to go talk about ENIAC at this WWII history event