New Computer!!!!

Date 04-15-2007 21:34 Edited 04-15-2007 21:36

Tim, Congratulations, but I can't tell any difference on this end...When I was 15 yr. old, I couldn't even spell "computer".

By billvanderhoof (****)

Date 04-17-2007 07:40

When I was 15 (1955) I didn't know computers existed. They did, having been developed during WWII for mostly code breaking purposes. They were constructed from thousands of vacuum tubes, used gigantic amounts of power, generated massive amounts of heat, and were expected to fail within an hour of being started. If you could have somehow assembled all the computers in the world into a single machine it wouldn't have had the processing power of a Game Boy. The first commercial transistor radio had been released the year before. The computers that most of us use today have computing power that exceeds the power of machines that would have been found in computer labs of major universities in the 1970's. We've come a long way.
Bill

By ssbn727 (*****)

Date 04-17-2007 14:48

Hey Bill!
You forgot to mention the computers that the Chinese, the folks from the lost civilization of Atlantis, the Mayans, Incas, the Egyptians, Greeks, Romans came up with which were for the most part purely mechanical in nature!!! True marvels of ancient engineering I might add!!!

Respectfully,
Henry

By billvanderhoof (****)

Date 04-18-2007 05:18

Indeed- although I limited myself to electronic devices numerous mechanical computers existed. The abacus still is in use, the slide rule, stonehenge which has been shown to be an astronomical computer, the norden bombsight from WWII, gun computers from WWII battleships (they may have been partly electronic, when New Jersey was reactivated duriing Vietnam the Navy had to go find some of those old salts to show the new guys how they worked). Frieden, Marchant and surely others made quite good mechanical calculators which could multiply and divide (neat to watch).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Babbage
Link points to an article on Charles Babbage who was an early 1800's mathematition who designed an early programmable, mechanical computer. Although it was not successfully constructed at the time it has recently been modeled and proven feasable.
This could easily turn into a book. I'll stop now.
Bill

By devo

Date 04-24-2007 14:59

You forgot to mention the Curta mechanical hand calculator. It looks like a pepper grinder and can compute to twelve places. I forget the details of it's history, but the Curta family made adding machines in the early 1900's. They were rounded up and sent to work by the Nazi's (I think) and Mr. Curta had the plans for the hand calculator locked up in his brain. From memory, he wrote detailed plans for building these intricate computing machines. It saved his life.

By fbrieden (***)