#colossus

shaungriffith1964@pluspora.com

First Computing Conference?

Amazeballs

The Los Alamos peak moment was the brilliant lecture on the British WW II Colossus computing engines by computer scientist and historian of computing Brian Randell. Colossus machines were special-purpose computers used to decipher messages of the German High Command in WW II. Based in southern England at Bletchley Park, these giant codebreaking machines regularly provided life-saving intelligence to the allies. Their existence was a closely-held secret during the war and for decades after. Randell's lecture was — excuse me — a bombshell, one which prompted an immediate re-assessment of the entire history of computing. Observes conference attendee (and inventor of ASCII) IBM's Bob Bemer, "On stage came Prof. Brian Randell, asking if anyone had ever wondered what Alan Turing had done during World War II? From there he went on to tell the story of Colossus — that day at Los Alamos was close to the first time the British Official Secrets Act had permitted any disclosures. I have heard the expression many times about jaws dropping, but I had really never seen it happen before."

https://computerhistory.org/playlists/international-research-conference-on-the-history-of-computing/

#computerhistory #colossus

hackaday@xn--y9azesw6bu.xn--y9a3aq

The First New Vacuum Tube Computer Design For Well Over Half A Century

image

In a few museums around the world, there lies the special experience of seeing some of the earliest computers. These room-filling monsters have multiple racks of vacuum tubes that are kept working by the dedication and care of their volunteer maintainers. A visit to the primordial vacuum tube computer, Colossus at Bletchley Park, UK, led [Mike] on the path towards designing an entirely new one. He thinks it's the first to see the light of day in over five decades. ENA, the Electron tube New Automatic Computer, is the result.

It uses 550 Soviet 6N3P double triodes, and its 8-bit Von Neumann architecture is constructed from the tubes wired up as 5-input NOR gates. ROM is a diode matrix, and RAM comes courtesy of reed relays. The whole thing is assembled as eleven PCBs on a wall-mounted frame, with a console that holds the piece de resistance, a display made from an array of LEDs. A Pong game is in development, meanwhile the machine makes an impressive room heater.

If you'd like to see some more vacuum tube computational goodness, we saw Colossus at the National Museum of Computing, back in 1996.

#computerhacks #retrocomputing #colossus #tubecomputer #vacuumtube