The Unexpected Fact about the First Computer Programmer

Very well.

A 10 foot cable set.

The server is in the basement for a couple of reasons: It's cooler
year round, and I can't hear the whine from the drives. Likewise, the
ethernet switch is also in the basement so that I don't have to listen
to its 3 very noisy fans. So, I have lots of cables running down
there.

The server is NT4 in an AT style box, with mirrored drives. The
re-mirror after a power failure takes HOURS, and makes the server
horribly piggy. So, I shut it down when a bad storm comes by, but not
power off. If there is one power failure, it comes back up normally.
Two power failures, and it's piggy time.

I would rather push a button, and let a solenoid to the kicking.

I don't mind hard work. It's hard physical work that's out.

 

But there are other people reading his fluff. They may need
repetition. Besides, the thread is just now getting interesting
with your post about interrupts. There may be a few other people
who will read it and get interested. A select few may even
try to write some code ;-).

/BAH

 

What about the 407 boards? We didn't call the printer a computer
but it did have modifyable[ugh!] circuitry. Since I wasn't allowed
to learn how to make a plug board, I don't know what you could
do with it.

/BAH

 

Vannevar Bush's Differential Analyzer could be set up to do different
types of calculation, and it certainly did have the same "social
position" as, say, the SSEC: an awesome mathematical machine
performing vast calculations.

Since it was analog, it couldn't be set up for, say, word processing,
but I wouldn't say it wasn't a computer - even though it wasn't fully
equivalent to a Universal Turing Machine.

Other exotic aids to calculation, such as a tide predictor, or the
Antikythera Mechanism, are things I would say are "not computers",
even though a tide predictor can be set up to calculate different
combinations of harmonics.

I don't know enough about the design of the early race-track
totalisators to comment on their relevance, although I've seen them
mentioned. Office accounting machines that could perform a sum of
products operation automatically, and accumulate multiple totals,
existed; I don't know enough detail about this history to know if
there was one that was programmable enough to meet my minimum
definition of a computer.

Yes, the Bell Relay Calculator is another very early computer, and
discussed in histories of the field. At least, the one that worked on
complex numbers could use a program from paper tape.

John Savard

 

No question.

Not in the sense of Von Neuman architecture, no. The program is
"user" modifiable though.