Talk:History of computing hardware/Archive 2

Archive 1

Archive 2

American developments

Just curious; why is "American developments" a distinct section? --Khendon 14:37, 1 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Earlier versions indeed intermixed the various projects irregardless of nation. Thus the current headings are a matter of preference by the contributors.

Hm. I think it makes much more sense to have a purely chronological article. --Khendon 16:46, 1 Mar 2005 (UTC)

I made the change in organization a while ago, to put Zuse and Colossus before the stuff on what was happening in America because it was the American work that led to ENIAC and the EDVAC design. Go back and read what it was like before and after the change was made and you'll hopefully see why I did it. Personally I think the article pays too much attention to Zuse and Colossus - they were both fascinating dead ends IMO - and if I was reorganizing the article further would considerably trim down the material on them. --Robert Merkel 23:13, 1 Mar 2005 (UTC)

According to http://www.scl.ameslab.gov/Projects/ABC/Trial.html, the role that the Atanasoff-Berry computer had in influencing the design of ENIAC may be grossly understated in this article

Request for references

Hi, I am working to encourage implementation of the goals of the Wikipedia:Verifiability policy. Part of that is to make sure articles cite their sources. This is particularly important for featured articles, since they are a prominent part of Wikipedia. The Fact and Reference Check Project has more information. Thank you, and please leave me a message when a few references have been added to the article. - Taxman 19:33, Apr 22, 2005 (UTC)

Taxman, this is an overview article, summarising facts found across many other articles. Hence, there's likely not to be much direct referencing here. --Robert Merkel 04:19, 23 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Added W.J. Eckert's little orange book. It would be good to acknowledge Lewis Fry Richardson's work, but it was decades before computers arose which could implement his method. (Now it would be called a system analysis, but he invented a field here.) I don't see a suitable way to work it into the article, which is about hardware, after all. Ancheta Wis 07:46, 23 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Great, thanks for your work, that is much better. Certainly an overview article can have references that back up its facts too. - Taxman 13:49, Apr 23, 2005 (UTC)

Heron of Alexandria

I scanned the article page and couldn't find any refference to Heron. I thought it may be a good idea to put a reference to his automated theater in the beggining, right around Wilhelm Schickard. However, I'm not sure since the concept of computing here seems to be more calculation-based, if no one has any problems I think it would be a good addition. Herons automated theater was a series of pegs with strings wrapped around them. Various weights were tied to the strings and controled the movement of objects for the play. In the end it was a simple analog computer program. --Capi crimm 03:21, 24 May 2005 (UTC)

I propose that you start a new page, History of automata or History of automatons. Stanislaw Ulam, John Von Neumann, John H. Conway, ... Stephen Wolfram were/are quite aware that the computing paradigm has automata in it. The topic is called Category:Cellular automata. However the concept of computing is tied to Leibniz' notion of expression evaluation, which means, in the case of a computing machine, we are automating human computation. When we are automating the motion of a puppet, which is one of the things that computers can do, the subject is called Automatic control, or Cybernetics or Robotics. Computer used to be a job title. Perhaps someday computers will be called controllers, as well. Come to think of it, perhaps History of controllers or History of cybernetics would be a good page for Heron's automated theater. Ancheta Wis 08:52, 24 May 2005 (UTC)

When I followed the Cellular automata link myself, I found material on the history of cellular automata, which would work quite well on the future History of ... page to which I am referring, as well as Heron's automated theater. Would you like to start such a page? I could contribute to it as well. Ancheta Wis 08:57, 24 May 2005 (UTC) If History of Cybernetics were to be the page, then Norbert Wiener's concept of the steersman (the root meaning of cybernetics) or the pilot would come into play. Aeronautics would come into play as well, because the theory of control became pressing with with the invention of the airplane. There is an extensive literature on automatic control in the IEEE Transactions. So we wouldn't just be flying blindly, to put a little pun in this. Machine vision could also be added, if the topic were to be Cybernetics.

List of books

I added a list of books for further reading. These are the ones I had on my shelf. The order may look haphazard, but I tried to put the more accessible ones at the top. I thought about ordering them by date or by author - if anyone thinks they should be that way, please feel free to change the order (and to add to the list, of course). --Bubba73 20:15, 7 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Thanks. If you had used them to fact check material in this or other articles, please consider listing them as actual references, or better yet, citing individual facts to them. Much better than taking a (potentially unknown) Wikipedia editor's word for the material is citing it to a reliable source. Use whatever format you like, but (Smith, 2003) is fine, or you can use some form of footnote system including the invisible one. Thanks again. - Taxman ^Talk 23:12, Jun 7, 2005 (UTC)

I haven't done much (if anything) to this page, but I've contributed a lot to particular computers, mainly 1946-1954. I used 6 or 7 of those books, but mainly about 3 of them. I should have put a reference for each of the edits (I did on a few) at the time, since now it is hard to know where I got what information, w/o looking it up again.

Too much analog...

Maybe some of the new analog computer stuff should be trimmed (and placed in the appropriate article), as it leaves the article as a whole rather unbalanced. --Robert Merkel 04:15, 11 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Add more to the other sections then. Greg321 10:39, 11 Jun 2005 (UTC)

This article is supposed to be a readable summary of the history of computing hardware. At the moment, this is like a history of the automobile that spent half its content looking at steam-powered cars. The excessive information obscures the forest for the trees.--Robert Merkel 23:29, 11 Jun 2005 (UTC)

While not an advocate of the current balance in the content, the current information does highlight the fact that steam powered computation was a vision which pioneers like Babbage and William Stanley Jevons were pursuing. It is not irrelevant, as it shows that technologies such as both mechanical and electrical analog computation, electronic digital computation, DNA computation and quantum computing are possible technologies, and certainly not the only possible forms for computing hardware. The period from 1945-1950 was important, but not the only possibility. It could have happened several other ways. The mechanical antecedents are very important, as they illuminate a path that could have been taken as early as the 1500s; only the requirements for precision of manufacture in the computing devices are missing for large-scale computing hardware. Ancheta Wis 12:40, 13 Jun 2005 (UTC)

That's an interesting point to discuss a little bit, but too much speculation as to what might have happened if history had turned out differently is likely to get unencyclopedic very quickly. --Robert Merkel 01:25, 14 Jun 2005 (UTC)

William Stanley Jevons actually was one who dreamed of steam-powered computation, possibly as early as the time when he lived in Australia 150 years ago. His Logic Machine was exhibited in Sydney last year, BTW. Ancheta Wis 21:42, 14 Jun 2005 (UTC)

More detail on some sections

More detail could be added to the sections on electronic computation. We could add more on the role of Herman Goldstine, von Neumann, etc. for example. What I have in mind is the chance meeting of Herman Goldstine and von Neumann on the Princeton train, and how it turned into a doctoral examination on Computer Engineering for Goldstine. Another item might be how the Israelis got the von Neumann architecture first hand; that is how their first machine got built. Another item might be the use of Binary Coded Decimal in the first electronic computers. Perhaps we might sketch a little outline before actually adding in the text. Ancheta Wis 23:36, 14 Jun 2005 (UTC)

• I agree. Some of this is in other articles. See IAS machine for how Israel got the von Neumann architecture - the plans for the IAS were made freely available, and about 15 computers were based on the design, WEIZAC was one of them. Bubba73 01:10, 15 Jun 2005 (UTC)

A comment from another point of view

I was active in leading edge electronics in about 1970. The article makes good sense and fills me in on a number of things I didn't know. Its a good article. It doesn't mention the driving force for miniturization, nor where the money came from to do the leading edge research and its subsequent application. It doesn't talk about how transistors, once discovered, were worked into machines which made a few decisions by themselves, based on inputs from other machines. The theoretical developments (i.e. transitors, field effect transistors, storage devices) were implemented into hardware and miniturized in a number of ways. While I don't know exactly, the USA military was a huge force in the area. Taxpayers in large measure paid for research (universities) and implementation of reasearch (military projects). As an example of implementation, I worked for a company that contracted to the military for a megabuck, producing 4 radar receivers that could be installed on 4 aircraft. The point I'm making is that the military money was a prime source of the energy that miniturized computers, there is a trickle down effect that goes on even today. Military spends money to have leading edge equipment and then that expertise trickles down to the consumer. Today the trickle down happens faster than in the 1970s is my impression. Anyway its a good and useful article as it stands, happy days. Terryeo 13:42, 4 February 2006 (UTC)

Overview

This article, along with ENIAC, Computer, Atanasoff–Berry Computer, Zuse and related pages, and others, are crying out (IMHO) for some sort of organizational overview. Does anyone know what Wikipedia policy is on such pages? -- Gnetwerker 18:36, 16 March 2006 (UTC)

So what do you have in mind? This article exists because User:Michael Hardy strongly differentiated the history of computing from its hardware. And there are the timelines of computing history from the Jargon files, which also strongly influenced the article. The computing article may be what you have in mind as a venue as it is mostly lists with a veneer of prose. Perhaps you might place your overview there? --Ancheta Wis 18:52, 16 March 2006 (UTC)

A question about units

I was curious as to why metric units were used throughout the article, especially in the section on American Development. Could Imperial units could be put in parenthetically? Yeah, I know, lazy Americans and all that… — ChardingLLNL 18:13, 20 July 2006 (UTC)

put 'before 1960' in the title

As it is, the article title is misleading and inaccurate. --Apantomimehorse 17:26, 17 August 2006 (UTC)

The article evolved. This is the original (or basic) article implemented upon the suggestion of User:Michael Hardy who wanted to clearly distinguish The History Of Computing from its hardware. I oppose turning a Featured Article upside down in favor of a renaming dispute. The article, if cast into the decades format would then be indistinguishable from the Timeline of Computing. But the current article clearly shows this history before Electronic Computers, which will eventually be superseded, whereas Computing will survive as long as Mankind survives. The hardware started with bones and sticks. 1960 is an accident of history and the convention of 32K pages for an article. --Ancheta Wis 19:43, 17 August 2006 (UTC)

Picture obscures text

The picture of Herman Holerith is on top of some text when seen on Firefox Resolution at 1280 x 1024 in full screen Sdp1978 00:12, 5 January 2007 (UTC) virendra

Speculative sentence?

"This technology was lost, however, and over 1,600 years would elapse before similarly complex computing machines were again created." - This sentence about the Antikythera mechanism seems purely speculative to me. This is arguing from absence of evidence, and largely unnecessary in this particular article in any case. Since we have not much evidence of prior art either, one might just as well claim this was a totally unique object in it's times, a totally unreasonable inference. -- Cimon Avaro; on a pogostick. 16:10, 5 April 2007 (UTC)

I have moderated the above statement in the article. I have a further query though... Is it fair to say that Kepler truly revolutionized astronomy? To me it appears like a peacock term. -- Cimon Avaro; on a pogostick. 06:36, 15 April 2007 (UTC)

400 years ago, Kepler spent 20 years of his life discovering his three laws, based on Tycho Brahe's observations. Yes, he really did revolutionize Astronomy. He was the first to do what he did. --Ancheta Wis 06:45, 15 April 2007 (UTC)

That's okay then -- Cimon Avaro; on a pogostick. 18:16, 15 April 2007 (UTC)

A question

Why link to EC-130 links not to EC-130 computer, but to EC-130 aircraft instead?

Punch card history

Puch cards actually had a predecessor, namely play drums found in carillons. They were widely used from the sixteenth century on in the low countries. Play drums were linked to a clock to automatically play music every hour. A picture of a play drum can be found in the dutch wikipedia article on carillons. Essentially this is very similar to book music, just a little more primitive. So I think it should be mentioned in the article. Gespenster 19:07, 10 August 2007 (UTC)

Von Neumann

The unabashed credit given here to Von Neumann for the stored computer architecture is not reflected by most historians or the Wikipedia page on Von Neumann himself -- go look. The agreed on interpretation by historians and the people who worked on the EDVAC project was that Von Neuman was collecting notes on the groups presentations, and decided, unilaterally, to publish it under his name. Presper Ekert is less kind and basically says that Von Neumann clearly decided to grab the credit for himself.

In any case, I doubt it serves any purpose for Wikipedia to distribute this kind of misinformation. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 76.102.198.58 (talk) 08:01, 30 September 2007 (UTC)

This is now fixed in the article. --Ancheta Wis (talk) 08:11, 10 May 2008 (UTC)

Punched cards are still used and manufactured in the current century

This sentence automatically updates its meaning when the century changes, and it changed only a few years ago. What century was intended? tooold 08:04, 4 October 2007 (UTC)

Changed the sentence. Thank you for your note. --Ancheta Wis 10:00, 4 October 2007 (UTC)