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 Yahoo News posting Roadrunner is fastest computer by the Associated Press, describes the supercomputer.

(Credit: Associated Press)

A few of its impressive attributes are:

To put the computer’s speed in perspective, if every one of the 6 billion people on earth used a hand-held computer and worked 24 hours a day it would take them 46 years to do what the Roadrunner computer can do in a single day.

The interconnecting system occupies 6,000 square feet with 57 miles of fiber optics and weighs 500,000 pounds. Although made from commercial parts, the computer consists of 6,948 dual-core computer chips and 12,960 cell engines, and it has 80 terabytes of memory.

The cost: $100 million.

Turek said the computer in a two-hour test on May 25 achieved a “petaflop” speed of sustained performance, something no other computer had ever done. It did so again in several real applications involving classified nuclear weapons work this past weekend.

A “flop” is an acronym meaning floating-point-operations per second. One petaflop is 1,000 trillion operations per second. Only two years ago, there were no actual applications where a computer achieved 100 teraflops — a tenth of Roadrunner’s speed — said Turek, noting that the tenfold advancement came over a relatively short time.

Impressive!

…John

Believe it or not, the Intel x86 microprocessor architecture is celebrating its 30th birthday. The Computerworld posting Happy birthday, x86! An industry standard turns 30

Thirty years ago, on June 8, 1978, Intel Corp. introduced its first 16-bit microprocessor, the 8086, with a splashy ad heralding “the dawn of a new era.” Overblown? Sure, but also prophetic. While the 8086 was slow to take off, its underlying architecture — later referred to as x86 — would become one of technology’s most impressive success stories

“X86″ refers to the set of machine language instructions that certain microprocessors from Intel and a few other companies execute. It essentially defines the vocabulary and usage rules for the chip. X86 processors — from the 8086 through the 80186, 80286, 80386, 80486 and various Pentium models, right down to today’s multicore chips and processors for mobile applications — have over time incorporated a growing x86 instruction set, but each has offered backward compatibility with earlier members of the family.

This grey beard programmed Intel’s first microprocessor product, the 4-bit wonder 4004, then the 8-bit wonder the 8008, and then the 16-bit wonder 8086. I held off buying a PC until the 32-bit 80386 hit the market, because of the kludgy 8086 memory management scheme.

Read this article for details about how the x86 architecture became king of the silicon heap.

…John

Did you know some ISPs (Internet Service Provider) inject advertisements into your Web queries? This and other stupid things some ISPs do are discussed in the Electronic Frontier Foundation posting Software for Keeping ISPs Honest.

The March 27th, 2008 announcement of a détente between Comcast and BitTorrent was great news. The two parties announced they will undertake a collaborative effort with one another and with the broader Internet and ISP community to more effectively address issues associated with rich media content and network capacity management. Read the details in the BitTorrent posting Comcast and BitTorrent Form Collaboration to Address Network Management, Network Architecture and Content Distribution

Unfortunately, the general problem of ISPs doing strange things to Internet traffic without telling their customers is likely to continue in the future. EFF and many other organizations are working on software to test ISPs for unusual (mis)behavior. In this detailed post, we have a round-up of the tools that are out there right now, and others that are in development…

Yep, it is likely to continue. The mighty power of greed knows no boundary. As though defending against Internet hackers, crackers, and crooks, isn’t enough, we will soon need to defend ourselves from unscrupulous ISPs.

…John

The Information Week posting Mac Buyer’s Guide: Which Apple Should You Pick? begins by saying

We’ve tested the Mac Pro, MacBook, MacBook Pro, MacBook Air, the iMac, the Mac Mini, and the XServe. There’s not a bad Apple among the bunch, and some are truly superb. We’ll help you choose one that’s right for you.

Maybe that most recent e-mail virus was the last straw. Maybe you’ve been longing for a computer that “just works” and that you actually look forward to using. Maybe Microsoft Vista finally just sent you right around the bend. Perhaps it was that “Mac guy” on the commercials. Or maybe you are the “Mac guy.”

My lust list contains a Mac Pro.

(Credit: Apple)

My Mac G4 is serving me well. My PhotonJohn.com high dynamic range imaging (HDRI), super-resolution (SR), and panorama panels, rendering processes are taxing it.

(Credit: Apple)

My lust list also contains a MacBook Pro for the photography studio, so I can control a tethered New and Improved Canon 450D / Rebel XSi camera. Once the camera is positioned for a shot, all fine tuning and firing is done from the MacBook Pro. The image is then downloaded for close inspection and initial rendering.

(Credit: Apple)

I’m a happy Mac camper. When I need to work on a Windows machine, I Remote Desktop Connection (RDC) to a Windows XP workstation.
I’ll be able to run Windows directly on the two Mac computers on my lust list using VMware Fusion.

…John