I've read a couple of books on colossus, very interesting, probably the first machine to have a bus structure, and it used loads of bottles. The next big thing was the american bloke who came up with the 'torpedo', and finally developed that into 'core' memory, a term that is still in use today, pc's ahev core memory, the orginal meaning refered to the fact that each 'bit' was stored on a magnetic core.
On 30 Jan, 20:43, threeneurons <[email protected]> wrote: > > The book I cited above covers the inventors and builders of ABC, ENIAC, > >Colossus, Z1 etc. It is a very interesting book. > > Tim Laing > > J. Presper Eckert and John Mauchly, designers of ENIAC really had a > run of bad luck. I read book on ENIAC. They followed that up with the > UNIVAC, for commercial sales. Honeywell cited the ABC, to void > Sperry's patents. Sperry made the UNIVAC line. They also worked on > EDVAC, but von Neumann got the credit for its architecture, and all > the processors that have been built since. > > Then there's the mystery of Colossus. It was kept top secret, until > the 70s. They built either 10 or 11 them, during WWII. They recently > built a new one from secondary documentation, as the actual schematics > & blueprints had been destroyed for security reasons. > > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UNIVAC_Ihttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colossus_computerhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atanasoff-Berry_Computerhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EDVAC > > As for personal history, my mother, and several other relatives, > worked for Burroughs Electrodata division, in Pasadena, California. > Shortly after the merger with Sperry, to from Unisys, they closed the > Pasadena plant. Ironically, that same building was occupied by > Earthlink during the height of the dot-com boom: > > http://www.computerhistory.org/timeline/?year=1956 > > They too abandoned it after their merger with Mindspring. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "neonixie-l" group. To post to this group, send an email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/neonixie-l?hl=en-GB.
