Trivia Question - Which was the first electronic computer

John Bond

Trivia question for this Friday – Which was the first Electronic Computer?

········ ENIAC
········ Babbage’s computer
········ Colossus - the UK code breaker
········ Atanasoff–Berry Computer
········ IBM Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator
········ One of the many Bell Labs devices
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atanasoff%E2%80%93Berry_Computer
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Interestingly, the first computer wasn’t electronic, and it was German!!!
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Konrad_Zuse
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If you want to get lost in the early science of computers, Turing’s your man. (Yes, he was mad. You have to be mad to have such an amazing insight.)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Turing_machine

The story behind the British breaking the German code in WW2 is very interesting. They built a 5 bit computer to do it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colossus_computer

It's disturbing to think that these huge devices were about the computational size of a Stamp...

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Gadgetman

Or that the first 'computer sabotage' happened in Norway during WWII?
(Saboteurs broke into a building and destroyed punchcards containing data on Norwegian youths which the Germans was planning to use to draft them for work gangs. Can't remember if they also disabled the readers. )

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Phil Pilgrim (PhiPi)

A widely (but not universally) accepted point of view holds that the Atanasoff-Berry computer (ABC) was the first electronic computer. There was a court case that concluded that the ENIAC was, in part, a derivative work of the ABC due to John Mauchly (one of the ENIAC principals) having visited Atanasoff in Iowa prior to the ENIAC's construction. A former professor of mine, Arthur Burks, who was involved with the ENIAC, along with his wife, Alice, wrote a book on the subject, The First Electronic Computer: The Atanasoff Story.

History, of course, is an untidy discipline; so, naturally, there are dissenters to the ABC-was-first point of view. The debate rages on.

-Phil

LoopyByteloose

Apparently, the earliest uses were code-breaking and thus the status of the early computers was never made public until much later. We may never know.

I find my own opinions to be heavily slanted by being American education. I was taught that Americans invented the TV, the airplane, the telephone. But, all seem to have others that did significant early work or immagrants that first did work abroad. Movies goes to the French and jet engines are divided between German and British.

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PLEASE CONSIDER the following:

Do you want a quickly operational black box solution or the knowledge included therein?······

···················· Tropically,····· G. Herzog [noparse][[/noparse]·黃鶴 ]·in Taiwan

Leon

A Colossus machine has been rebuilt at Bletchley Park and is actually working (only two bits, though):

http://www.picotech.com/applications/colossus.html

Babbage's Difference Engine 2 has been constructed and is working at the Science Museum in London:

http://www.sciencemuseum.org.uk/onlinestuff/stories/babbage.aspx

Leon

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Post Edited (Leon) : 2/10/2008 11:16:04 AM GMT