ITNews

Sixty years ago on June 21, 1948, the worlds first stored-program, digital computer was fired up at the University of Manchester.

(Credit: silicon.com)

The silicon.com posting Celebrating 60 years of computing tells the story of how Colossus, nicknamed ‘Baby’, helped crack Nazi codes during World War II.

By today’s standards, Baby was an extremely primitive machine. In modern terms, the prototype Baby had a random access memory (RAM) of just 32 locations or ‘words’. Each word in the RAM consisted of 32 bits and a total of 1,024 bits of memory. According to university press officer Alex Waddington, the computing speed was 1.2 milliseconds per instruction, equivalent to a clock speed of slightly under 1kHz - more than two million times slower than a typical desktop processor today.

Waddington pointed out that an 80GB Apple iPod “is capable of storing 640 million times more information than the original Baby”.

Baby is one ancient computer this grey-beard hasn’t programmed.

…John

The EETimes posting Is shortwave a short-timer?

The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) recently announced that it would discontinue its shortwave radio broadcasts to Europe, following the lead of other major shortwave services. The very mention of the phrase “shortwave” (the spectrum from about 3 to 20 MHz) brought a nostalgic image to my mind.

Nostalgic images indeed. I’ve spent many an hour listening to shortwave broadcasts, and drooling over the latest and greatest radio receiver technology. One thing I learned early on was different parts of the world report the same news event differently.

(Credit: Ham Radio Gallery)

Shortwave broadcasts aren’t gone completely.

We should keep one more thing in mind before we put shortwave in that shallow, barely marked grave our industry digs for its castoffs: We may be prematurely saying goodbye. The BBC pointed out that it will continue broadcasts to much of Africa and Asia, where Internet access is rare and costly, despite the intentions of One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) and similar programs.

…John

The IBM Mathematical Formula Translating System, Fortran, programming language was delivered some 50 years ago.

No, I haven’t been programming with it every since, it was my primary programming language during the 60’s and 70’s.

…John

It was twenty years ago today Larry Wall unleashed the Practical Extract and Report Language, Perl. I’ve been programming with it every since.

…John

Another technology birthday. The transistor, a physically tiny electronic device, created a gigantic disruption in the electronic industry, and subsequently in the consumer market place.

None of the mass consumed devices such as the iPod, personal computers, flat screen televisions, and an unending parade of electronic gadgets would be produced using vacuum tubes, the predecessor of the transistor.

Thank you Julius Edgar Lilienfeld, Oskar Heil, William Shockley, John Bardeen and Walter Brattain for helping create this most marvelous device.

…John