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May 21St at the Time, the EDSAC Used IBM 726 Three Small Cathode Ray Tube Börje Langefors Screens to Display the State of Its Announced Memory

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May 21St at the Time, the EDSAC Used IBM 726 Three Small Cathode Ray Tube Börje Langefors Screens to Display the State of Its Announced Memory it played tic-tac-toe (known as Noughts and Crosses in the UK). May 21st At the time, the EDSAC used IBM 726 three small cathode ray tube Börje Langefors screens to display the state of its Announced memory. Each one could draw a May 21, 1952 Born: May 21, 1915; grid of 35 x 16 dots. Douglas re- purposed one of them for his Ystad, Sweden The IBM 726 was the company’s game, and obtained input (i.e. Died: Dec. 13, 2009 first magnetic tape unit, where to place a nought or intended for use with the Langefors developed the cross) via EDSAC’s rotary recently announced IBM 701 ‘infological equation’ in 1980, controller. [April 7], the company’s first which describes the difference electronic computer. between information and data in terms of additional semantic The 726 utilized half-inch tapes background and a with seven tracks. Six were for communication time interval. the data and the seventh was employed as a parity track. Langefors joined SAAB, the Some tapes were 1,200 feet long, Swedish aerospace and defense could store 2.3 MB of data, and company, in 1949 where he IBM claimed that just one could utilized analog devices for replace 12,500 punch cards. calculating wing stresses. The need for more powerful tools The drive could write 100 became evident, and the only characters per inch on a tape Swedish computer of the time, EDSAC CRT Tubes. Computer and read 75 inches per second. the BESK [April 1], was Lab, Univ. of Cambridge. CC BY To withstand the system’s fast insufficient for the task. So 2.0. starts and stops, it utilized a Langefors persuaded SAAB to “vacuum column” that created a build a new version of BESK that Douglas wrote the program, buffer of loose tape so it employed magnetic tape. The which he called “noughts and wouldn't snap when moved so project began in the fall of 1955 crosses”, as part of his thesis on rapidly. and was operational by 1956 as human-computer interaction. Buyers of a 701 needed to SARA (Saab’s Calculating The game acquired the OXO purchase two 726s, but IBM Machine). name much later when computer historian Martin generously provided two 1200- As SAAB's involvement in Campbell-Kelly released an foot and two 200-foot tape reels computers grew, its computing EDSAC simulator ( for free. The 726 quickly became work was moved to a new https://www.dcs.warwick.ac.uk the standard tape unit for IBM company called DataSaab. One /~edsac/). machines. result was the SANK (Saab’s The 726 wasn't the first tape Automatic Navigational Another contender for first drive for a commercial computer Calculator), renamed the visual computer game is “Bertie – that was the UNISERVO for the DataSaab D2 in 1960. It was a the Brain” [Aug 25], also a tic- UNIVAC 1 [March 31]. small desktop calculator tac-toe player. However, it ran weighing only 150 kg, and was on dedicated hardware rather probably mainland Europe’s than a general-purpose first transistorized computer computer. Atari 7800 [Oct 7]. Another DataSaab The first non-graphical product was Algol-Genius, an computer game was probably May 21, 1984 amalgamation of Algol [Jan 11] the Nimatron [Sept 24], on show Atari [June 27] announced the and COBOL [April 8]. at the New York’s World’s Fair Atari 7800 ProSystem game in April 1940. console, its first system designed Douglas also established one of by an outside company, General Alexander Shafto the earliest programming Computer Corporation (GCC). courses in the UK, at the GCC had a background in arcade “Sandy” Douglas University of Leeds in 1957. The games, so the 7800 system used first machine for students was a an architecture similar to arcade Born: May 21, 1921; Ferranti [Feb 27] Pegasus, machines of the time. London, UK installed in the disused Eldon Died: April 29, 2010 It offered superior graphics (up Chapel on Woodhouse Lane. The to 256 colors) and game play Douglas built the first graphical machine was known as Lucifer, involving a large number of computer game, OXO, in 1952. short for Leeds University moving objects (75 to 100) Running on the EDSAC [May 6] Computing Installation which far exceeded previous at the University of Cambridge, (FERranti). consoles even though it only 1 employed a slightly customized upon whether they originate in 6502 chip [Sept 16], called the the House of Commons or the Atari SALLY. The console's weak Senate). spot was sound, since it In March 2001, an Australian utilizedthe same old sound chip version began circulating, with as in the Atari 2600 [Oct 14]. the email 'Schnell' now an Other strong selling points were Australian member of that the 7800 was almost fully Parliament. backward-compatible with the 2600, and could be upgraded to become a full-fledged home computer. In this latter category, there were plans to release a full-featured $100 keyboard, and a modem cartridge, but they never appeared. Although the 7800 was announced today, it was only released in May 1986, delayed by the sale of Atari to Tramiel Technology on [July 1], and a dispute over which of the two firms should pay GCC for their work. Even after the machine hit the shops, it only managed a disappointing range of games compared to its rivals, such as Nintendo’s NES [Oct 18]. Schnell’s Bill May 21, 1998 The US Postal Service refuted an email spreading across the Internet claiming that a Congressman Tony Schnell (R) has introduced “Bill 602P,” which would allow the government to impose a five- cent surcharge on email. This would supposedly help defray the financial losses that the postal service had suffered since the advent of the Internet. There was no Congressman Schnell, and no Bill 602P. This should have been obvious since we all know that congressional bill names begin with either H., R., or S., depending upon whether they originate from the House or Senate). The real Tony Schnell, a Canadian MP, had originated the hoax in Canada, which is also suprising since Bill 602P was incorrectly numbered in that country as well, where parliamentary bills must begin with either a C. or S., depending 2 .
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