Web Sites Useful to Computing History
The following is a list of suggested web sites useful in the computing curriculum.
These sites were given in the IEEE Annals of the History of Computing, Volume
21, Number 1, January - March 1999.
Links to Web Sites of Historic Computers
This is a list of web sites dedicate to specific historical computers.
- The Analytic Engine is
an excellent site on Charles Babbages's Analytic Engine. The Analytic Engine
was a mechanical computer that was "programmed" using punched cards. Had it
been built, it would have been the size of a steam locomotive! The design
was sound but the technology and financial resources weren't quite there.
The Analytic Engline is not to be confused with Babbage's earlier Difference
Engine which was a calculator.
- Z1 Z2 Z3 Z4 :.
A series of four computers constructed by Konrad Zuse in Berlin just before
and during WW II. One was built in the living room of his parent's Berlin
apartment! The German government was not interested in Zuse's computers.
- Howard Aiken's
Harvard Mk I (a.k.a. Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator) proposed
in 1937, funded by IBM, completed in 1943 was built at Harvard. It was an
electromechanical device built out of standard IBM parts controlled by paper
tape. Later descendants were the Harvard Mk II, III, and IV.
- The ENIAC
was first all-electronic sequence controlled computer (there was
no memory to store a program). To program it you had to "re-wire" it. But
once "programmed" it was fast because it was electonic! Work on the ENIAC
led to the idea of the "stored program concept" where memory is used to store
both data and code.
- During WWII the Code and Cipher School at Bletchley Park (UK) was the
site of a top secret project whose purpose was to decrypted secret German
codes, the most famous being the Enigma code. The Colossus
was a secret war-time computer built to help Britian decipher the German Lorenz Cipher
(somewhat like the Enigma cipher). Protected by British government secrecy, only recently have the details
of the Colossus been made known. A description of the Lorenz Cipher and the rebuild
project at Bletchley Park can be found at
www.codesandciphers.org/uk/lorenz/fish.htm
- The Atanasoff-Berry Computer:
John Atanasoff at the University of Iowa with the help of Clifford Berry constructed
a small special purpose computer in the late 30's. This site deals with its
reconstruction 60 years after the event.
- The SSEM (Small-Scale Experimental
Machine) Manchester Mark I Prototype. The SSEM was the first stored program
computer to execute a program, an event which occurred on June 21, 1948. The
SSEM demonstrated the use of the Williams Storage Tube as a memory device
and was the prototype for the larger Manchester Mark I which was marketed
as the Ferranti Mark I. Tnis was the first in a long line of successful computers
developed at the University of Manchester (UK) and marketed by Ferranti Ltd.
There is also a reference
manual that contains an extensive treatment of the SSEM instruction set.
- The EDSAC, from
Cambridge University (UK) was the first large-scale stored program computer
to become operational (1949). Unlike the SSEM Manchester Mark I prototype
which used the Williams Storage Tube, the EDSAC used mercury delay lines
for main memory. This site also contains links to an EDSAC simulator!
- The
IAS (Institute of Advanced Study) Computer built at Princeton and
completed in 1952 implemented von-Neumann's ideas for the design of a modern
digital computer. It was the proto-type for many subsequence machines.
Wikipedia gives more
information about the IAS computer and its descendants. The
ISA (Instruction
Set Architecture) of the IAS computer is fairly simple.
- The
Whirlwind computer (MIT) which began as a aircraft simulator morphed
into the first computer designed for real-time operation (as opposed to
batch standard operation) Again
Wikipedia.
gives more information about Whirlwind.
- After a fallout with the University of Penn over patent rights Presper
Eckert and John Mauchly of ENIAC fame formed the Eckert-Mauchly Computer
Company to market the
UNIVAC (Universal Automatic Computer), making it the first commercially
available computer in the United States. Their firm was purchased by
Remington-Rand which was later acquired by Sperry Corporation (Sperry-Rand)
which later combined with Burroughs to become UNISYS. For a while UNIVAC
was synonymous with the word computer.
- The.IBM
701 (1952) which was also known as the Defense Calculator was IBM's
first digital computer
- The IBM 7094 and
CTTS Some think the IBM 7094 was the best computer ever designed. The
7094 was a 36-bit word addressable machine.
- The IBM 1620
A very nice mid-sized 2nd generation IBM machine from the mid 60's.
It was a decimal machine (not binary) and was character oriented. Each cell
in memory was 6 bits wide. The IBM called it the CADET. The story is that
it stands for "Can't Add and Doesn't Even Try" because it does addition and
multiplication using table look up. Click here for a link to
a Java based 1620 simulator.
- The PDP-8
from Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) was the first successful "mini-computer".
The PDP-8 was a 12-bit word addressable computer with only 8 opcodes! This
site includes links to a PDP-8 programmers reference manual. Click here
to access my own PDP-8 Home page (with a link to a WinZipped file containing
a PDP-8 Emulator that runs under MS-DOS).
- The BESM-6 was a Soviet
mainframe computer designed in the mid 60's whose production lasted into
the mid 80's. It was a 48-bit word-addressable machine used for "number-crunching".
Interesting site since it contains information about Soviet computer architecture.
BESM stands for "Bol'shaya (or Bystrodejstvuyushchaya) Ehlektronno-Schetnaya
Mashina", that is, "Big (or High-speed) Electronic Calculating Machine". There
also existed BESM-4 (with 45-bit words).