Computers in Great Britain • .. Stanley Gill Analog
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Highlights from Digital Computer Museum Report 1/1982
file:////cray/Shared/COLLECTIONS/Curator/mondo_museum_report.htm Return to List of Reports Highlights from Digital Computer Museum Report 1/1982 Contents of Highlights ● Back of Front Cover ● The Director's Letter ● Unusual Photos ● LECTURE SERIES Back of Front Cover The Digital Computer Museum is an independent, non-profit, charitable foundation. It is the world's only institution dedicated to the industry-wide preservation of information processing devices and documentation. It interprets computer history through exhibits, publications, videotapes, lectures, educational programs, excursions, and special events. Hours and Services The Digital Computer Museum is open to the public Sunday through Friday, 1:00 pm to 6:00 pm. There is no charge for admission. The Digital Computer Museum Lecture Series Lectures focus on benchmarks in computing history and are held six times a year. All lectures are videotaped and archived for scholarly use. Gallery talks by computer historians, staff members and docents are offered every Wednesday at 4:00 and Sunday at 3:00. Guided group tours are available by appointment only. Books, posters, postcards, and other items related to the history of computing are available for sale at the Museum Store. The Museum's lecture hall and reception facilities are available for rent on a prearranged basis. For information call 617-467-4443. BOARD OF DIRECTORS Charles Bachman C. Gordon Bell Gwen Bell Harvey C. Cragon Robert Everett C. Lester Hogan Theodore G. Johnson Andrew C. Knowles, III John Lacey Pat McGovern George Michael Robert N. Noyce Kenneth H. Olsen Brian Randell Edward A. Schwartz Michael Spock Erwin O. Tomash Senator Paul E. -
Computer Oral History Collection, 1969-1973, 1977 Interviewee
Computer Oral History Collection, 1969-1973, 1977 Interviewee: Ingerman Interviewer: Date: June 17, 1971 Repository: Archives Center, National Museum of American History Description: No transcript Abstract: Citation: Computer Oral History Collection, Archives Center, National Museum of American History. Copyright: Copyright to this oral history is held by the Archives Center, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution. Permission to quote from the transcript under the fair use provision of the copyright law (Title 17, U.S. Code) is granted provided that this source is cited. For additional information, contact the Archives Center at 202.633.3270 or [email protected] Computer Oral History Collection, 1969-1973, 1977 Interviewee: David R. Israel Interviewer: Richard R. Mertz Date: April 22, 1970 Repository: Archives Center, National Museum of American History Description: Transcript, 40 pp. Abstract: Israel, born in 1927, came from a family that wanted him to be a Harvard-trained lawyer; instead, he studied electrical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of technology (MIT) from 1945 to 1949, interrupting his work for thirteen months to work on radio in the Navy. At MIT, he studied numerical computation with Z. Kopal, analog computers with S.H. Caldwell, and programming digital computers with W.G.Welchman. He did graduate work at MIT's Digital Computer Laboratory. There, following the lead of Jay Forrester, he became especially interested in real time computer applications and wrote a thesis on civilian air traffic control in 1951. He also worked on Project Charles, a program intended to use the Whirlwind computer for defense against manned bombers. The Whirlwind featured self-controlled marginal checking, core memory, a light pen, and real time control applications. -
A History of Silicon Valley a Book by Arun Rao and Piero Scaruffi
A History of Silicon Valley The Greatest Creation of Wealth in History (An immoral tale) being a presentation by piero scaruffi www.scaruffi.com adapted from the book “A History of Silicon Valley” Piero Scaruffi • Cultural Historian • Cognitive Scientist • Blogger • Poet • www.scaruffi.com 2 www.scaruffi.com This is Part 1 • See http://www.scaruffi.com/svhistory for the index of this Powerpoint presentation and links to the other parts – 1900-1960 – The 1960s – The 1970s – The 1980s – The 1990s – The 2000s 3 www.scaruffi.com What the book is about… • The book is a history of the high-tech industry in the San Francisco Bay Area (of which Silicon Valley is currently the most famous component) 4 www.scaruffi.com The founder? • Founders of Silicon Valley – Leland Stanford – Fred Terman – William Shockley – DARPA 5 www.scaruffi.com The founder? • Emperor Norton in 1859 6 www.scaruffi.com How it all Started • 1872: California enacts its first civil code, that bans “non-compete agreements” 7 www.scaruffi.com Electrical Engineering • The challenge for the West Coast in the 19th century: to carry high-tension voltage (dams) over long- distances to the cities of the coast • Harris Ryan at Stanford (1905) inaugurates a cooperative model between university and industry • The Bay Area's electrical power companies use the Stanford High Voltage Laboratory 8 www.scaruffi.com Radio Engineering • San Francisco's port needs a wireless communication system • Charles Herrold in San Jose starts the first radio station in the USA with regularly scheduled programming -
Computer Oral History Collection, 1969-1973, 1977 Interviewee: Donald E. Eckdahl Interviewer: Henry Tropp Date: September 2
Computer Oral History Collection, 1969-1973, 1977 Interviewee: Donald E. Eckdahl Interviewer: Henry Tropp Date: September 25, 1972 Repository: Archives Center, National Museum of American History Description: Transcript, 47 pp. Abstract: Eckdahl, born in 1924, studied electrical engineering at the University of California, entered the Navy's V-l2 program and served as a Navy officer from August 1945 until the following spring. He considered doing graduate work at the California Institute of Technology, but was hired by Erik Ackerlind of Northrop. There he worked with Richard Sprague and Floyd Steele on a guidance system for the Snark missile. Eckdahl was particularly interested in logic and architecture design and circuitry. Steele not only saw how Boolean algebra could be applied to vacuum tube circuits, but came up with the idea of the Digital Differential Analyzer (DIDA). Eckdahl worked on an alternative magnetic drum machine, the MADDIDA, in which addition was handled serially rather than in parallel. The Northrop engineers learned of stored programs from the Electronic Discrete Variable Automatic Computer (EDVAC) proposal and consulted with Eckert and Mauchly. Steele, Sarkissian, Sprague, Eckdahl, and others left Northrop to start Computer Research Corporation (CRC). They first designed the CRC 101, an airborne digital differential analyzer built for North American. The CRC 102 or the Cambridge Digistal Automatic Computer (CADAC) was a binary general purpose computer, with magnetic drum memory, serial design and as few vacuum tubes as possible. Designers made early use of flow diagrams, an approach picked up by General Electric. Eckdahl comments on the acquisition of CRC by NCR, on diverse Northrop and CRC staff, and on the differences between early designers of computers like him and users who developed the software of assemblers, compilers, and executives. -
Computer Oral History Collection, 1969-1973, 1977 Interviewee
Computer Oral History Collection, 1969-1973, 1977 Interviewee: Vincent Neisius Interviewer: Robina Mapstone Date: March 1973 Repository: Archives Center, National Museum of American History Description: Transcript, 59 pp. Abstract: Neisius, born in 1917, became a teacher at Georgia Tech and consultant at the Georgia Power Company. He was an advocate of Charles A. Stephenson's methods for analyzing transportation fare structures. Stephenson asked him to join Axel Wenner-Gren's Alweg Transit Research Company to make plans for purchase of the Long Island Railroad. Meanwhile, Glenn Hagen persuaded Wenner-Gren to finance a computer company headed by Hagen and staffed by people from the Northrop computer division that had been purchased by Bendix. When Wenner-Gren decided not to buy the Long Island Railroad, Neisius was sent out to review computer designs at Hagen's company, Logistics Research. Neisius wrote programs for the Axel Wenner-Gren Automatic Computer (ALWAC) which was demonstrated as a fully operational computer at a June 1953 conference in San Francisco only 8 month after the decision to build a computer was made. He describes the rapid construction, the reliability, the memory channels, and the interactive demonstration routines of the ALWAC I. After this machine sold in 1955, Neisius delivered the ALWAC II to the David Taylor Model Basin and impressed the Weather Bureau with the powers of the machine. Several years later there was an attempt by other Wenner-Gren employees to remove Glenn Hagen. All employees, who favored the revolt, were fired (including Neisius). The employees who left joined the J.B. Rea Company. -
Military Roots
CHAPTER THREE Military Roots WHEN historians examine the origins of the electronic digital computer, they usually give top billing to the pioneering efforts of the American scientists J. Presper Eckert and John W. Mauchly, who built their Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer (ENIAC) during World War II. Eckert and Mauchly are justly and widely honored as the men whose efforts and risks led to the first machines recognizable as modern computers. They also founded the first private computer systems company. But historians now also recognize a lesser known history of the computer, one whose roots run deep into the most sensitive and secret corners of a modern military establishment. It was no accident that the military services largely financed the postwar development of the computer in the 1950s, for computing technology had played a pivotal role in the Allied war effort. The military indirectly bankrolled even the Eckert and Mauchly computer projects, and these relatively open projects were only the tip of a much larger, and sometimes hidden, technological iceberg. The military computer projects, as well as Eckert and Mauchly's daring bet on an as-yet nonexistent commercial market, led to the first stirrings of interest in computers in the 1950s by business and industry. Indeed the first commercial computers were direct copies or adaptations of machines developed for military users. After the war, the commercial potential of government-sponsored research became more apparent. The first great political clashes over technology policy in the United States occurred. Origins of the Computer By the time war broke out in 1939, engineering and science had already made important advances in several seemingly unrelated areas . -
Where Are We Going, Phil Morse? Believed That Such Was the Case Who Ended up Making It So
LARRY OWENS This paper discusses the failure of the attempt to establish a computational center at MIT in the 1930s and the effect it had on the subsequent shift from analog to digital computing during the 1950s. Introduction n 1957, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) threw track with plans for an expanded stable of machinery to comple- I the switches on a newly installed IBM 704 that signaled both ment the Bush analyzers and revitalized ambitions to become a the inauguration of its new Computation Center under the leader- world center for the study of computation. While the center faced ship of Philip Morse and a commitment to leadership in the dy- new and aggressive rivals both within and without MIT (notably namic field of computing. Yet this was not the first time MIT had in the Whirlwind project in the Servomechanisms Laboratory and made such a commitment. In the 193Os, MIT had embarked on a in the ENIAC development at the University of Pennsylvania), it similar effort, one that seemed on the verge of fulfillment when was still the key player, a “going concern,” as James Killian re- the Carnegie Corporation agreed to fund the Department of Elec- ported to MIT President Compton in the fall of 1945, that had trical Engineering’s pioneering Center of Analysis. With $45,000 “contacts, reserve funds, prestige, and staff.“34 With the backing for two years, the center had planned of the administration, Sam Caldwell, the center’s director and . to capitalize on MIT’s growing reputation in machine com- Bush’s right-hand man in the early development of the analyzers, putation, based on Vannevar Bush’s 1931 differential ana- easily arranged with the Rockefeller Foundation a two-year, $100,000 study of electronic digital computation lyzer, .