Researcher Resurrects the First Computer 149
aleph60 writes "A German researcher is about to resurrect the first fully electronic general-purpose stored-program computer, the Manchester Mark 1 (1948). The functional replica will run the source code of an original program from 1952 by Christopher Strachey, whose sole purpose was generating love letters; it is historically interesting as one of the first examples of a text-generating program. The installation will be shown at an art exhibition in Germany at the end of April." Here is researcher David Link's Manchester Mark I emulator home, which generates a new love poem on each page load. When the Mark I had been used to search for new Mersenne primes in 1949, a press account coined the phrase "electronic brain" to characterize it.
Random Numbers on the Manchester Mark 1? (Score:5, Interesting)
HONEY LOVE
YOU ARE MY DEAR PASSION: MY ADORABLE FERVOUR: MY ARDENT INFATUATION: MY ARDENT DEVOTION. MY PASSIONATE LUST BREATHLESSLY HOPES FOR YOUR LIKING.
YOURS BURNINGLY
M. U. C.
Now that's some vintage computer porn!
But seriously, I'm interested in how the Manchester Mark 1 implemented its random number instruction (to select the phrases for the love poems). Was it von Neumann's [wikipedia.org] middle square method [wikipedia.org] from 1946? Does anyone know?
I remember lengthy discussion in my undergrad days of how a completely logical computer could come up with a truly random number and talking about the theory that every software solution is pseudorandom. I'm just wondering what the first computer had implemented.
Re:Random Numbers on the Manchester Mark 1? (Score:2, Interesting)
You need hardware, not software, to produce true random numbers. At the company I used to work at we discovered that some of our Zener diodes were 'too perfect' and they started to show an effect called micro-plasms (rather poorly documented). After some research we nailed it and I was able to use some of the engineering dies to make a true random number generator for my laptop.
Strachey and CPL (Score:3, Interesting)
Strachey was also the lead programmer behind the programming language CPL, the great-grandfather of C (via BCPL and B). CPL was too ambitious and was never completely implemented - it tried to do everything; a bit like Perl 6 really.
The overview paper:http://comjnl.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/abstract/6/2/134 is quite interesting; sadly it is now behind a pay-wall. There are some features of the language, such as type inference, which have not become common until recently. It also has some obvious poor decisions with hindsight - the same character starts and ends blocks; all lower case letters are single-character variable names; multiple-character variable names must be capitalised (this is done to allow implicit multiplication, ie, xyz=x*y*z). I suspect it could be implemented without huge difficulty with modern tools. Unfortunately, the full definition was never published, and only exists in a few copies of 'The CPL Working papers' archived in university libraries. Perhaps one day google will scan it.
Re:Random Numbers on the Manchester Mark 1? (Score:3, Interesting)
Now that's some vintage computer porn!
That makes me wonder... Who was the first person to depict the image of a naked woman on a computer (ASCII or otherwise)
see a RAND home computer (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:see a RAND home computer (Score:2, Interesting)
As another user pointed out, that is a hoax.
But don't be alarmed - I suggest a trip to one of my favourite blogs, Paleo-Future [paleofuture.com], where they've catalogued several genuine funky visions of these futuristic computer things. Just search for "computer" in the blog archive, click away, and be amazed. =)