Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 2013/01/09

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Subject: [Leica] Some artifacts at the Computer History Museum #2
From: kanner at acm.org (Herbert Kanner)
Date: Wed, 9 Jan 2013 22:16:14 -0800

This story is about a computer called Univac. It was the first computer sold 
commercial in this country; the first purchase made by the U.S. Census 
Bureau. The picture is of its console, one of the more spectacular consoles 
around.

Here is some background. During World War II, the army had a bunch of women 
math majors calculating ballistics tables for artillery. The work couldn't 
keep up with the demand, and two guys named John Mauchly and J. Presper 
Eckert, at the University of Pennsylvania Moore School of Electrical 
Engineering, proposed building an "electronic brain" to do these 
computations. It wasn't a programmable computer in today's sense; you 
programmed it by how you connected various panels together--basically you 
rewired the room. The thing had seventeen thousand vacuum tubes.

Some of these women that I mentioned above were hired to figure out the 
rewiring. This was a formidable task; they had to start by studying the 
logic diagrams of the device and went on from there. Ironically (sign of the 
age), when the war was over, military secrecy abandoned, and the thing shown 
to the press, these women were totally concealed and ignored. All honors 
went to the male engineers.

In a very valid sense, this machine, called ENIAC, was the legitimate 
ancestor of today's computers. When military secrecy ended, the Moore School 
held an internationally attended seminar on computer design, one in which 
some basic ideas were formulated. John Von Neumann wrote a summary paper on 
those ideas which his secretary unfortunately distributed all around the 
world, the result being that Von Neumann got erroneously credited with the 
basic design ideas; computers were said to have the "Von Neumann 
architecture".

Here is the direct connection between ENIAC and conventionally programmable 
computers. Several of the panels of the ENIAC were called "function tables". 
They had row upon row of ten-position switches into which the values of a 
table, e.g. logarithms, could be set. John von Neumann, the famous 
mathematician, working at Los Alamos on the hydrogen bomb, heard about the 
ENIAC and wondered if it could help in the calculations he was organizing. 
Somehow, the idea arose that maybe the machine could be wired in such a way 
that a program (instead of a mathematical function) could be put into a 
function table and the machine wired up to obey any such program. The idea 
worked. It slowed down the machine by about a factor of six but made the 
execution of more complex programs feasible and cut immensely the 
programming time. The machine was actually used then for calculations on the 
hydrogen bomb.

Eckert and Mauchly went on to found the company that made the Univac. In 
addition to the Census Bureau, early models were bought by the Pentagon and 
the Atomic Energy Commission. The company was eventually bought by Remington 
Rand and ultimately became Sperry-Rand.

http://gallery.leica-users.org/v/herbk1/L1002780.jpg.html

I also throw in for your entertainment a few detail shots of the Babbage 
Difference Engine.

http://gallery.leica-users.org/v/herbk1/L1002717-2.jpg.html
http://gallery.leica-users.org/v/herbk1/L1002720-2.jpg.html
http://gallery.leica-users.org/v/herbk1/L1002716-2.jpg.htmlr



Herbert Kanner
kanner at acm.org
650-326-8204

Question authority and the authorities will question you.






Replies: Reply from imagist3 at mac.com (George Lottermoser) ([Leica] Some artifacts at the Computer History Museum #2)
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