webber@porthos.rutgers.edu (Bob Webber) (06/21/88)
In article <31869@yale-celray.yale.UUCP>, lisper-bjorn@CS.YALE.EDU (Bjorn Lisper) writes: < In article <Jun.20.04.49.43.1988.3576@porthos.rutgers.edu< < webber@porthos.rutgers.edu (Bob Webber) writes: <... < <The earliest electronic stored-program computers that are < <well-documented in the public literature seem to be the EDVAC < <(proposal in Von Neumann's collected papers as well as significant < <discussion in the Moore School Lectures reprinted by MIT Press) and < <the ACE (Turing's proposal reprinted by MIT Press -- which differs < <from the machines actually built under that name). < < What about the early German computers? The Z-1 was built in 1941 or so and < the Germans claim that this is the first electronic computer. The man who < constructed it (I think his name was Zuse) wrote an autobiography where his < creations apparently have a big role. I haven't read it, though, so I can't < tell how technical it gets. Actually, the Z-1 was built in 1938 and was purely mechanical. The Z-3 was the 1941 machine and it was also the first to be ``fully operating.'' (Zuse terms Z-1 and Z-2 as ``test models''). It was based on electromechanical relay techology and ``programmed'' from a punched tape. The 1945 Z-4 used relays for the arithmetic unit but used a mechanic storage unit. With Schreyer, some preliminary work was done on electronic computer designs culminating in a calculator that converted 3-digit decimal to 10-digit binary. A design for a 2,000 tube electronic computer that would have combined this work with the mechanical computer work was turned down by the German Government (Zuse refers to the ENIAC as the first electronic calculator). Most people class the electro-magnetic relay machines (there were some in the U.S. around this time as well) as essentially mechanical and reserve the term electonic computer for vacumn-tube/transitor designs. However, a simulator of one of Zuse's machines is probably possible for one with some insight into the technology and would prove interesting to compare to Babbage's unimplemented designs as well as other machines. Zuse's programming language Plankalk\:ul developed in 1945 also merits study and is part of the current literature although it didn't make it there until the early 1970s. [The above is primarily based on Konrad Zuse's Some Remarks on the History of Computing which appeared in A HISTORY OF COMPUTING IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY -- A COLLECTION OF ESSAYS edited by N. Metropolis, J. Howlett, and Gian-Carlo Rota (Academic Press, 1980). Lots of good stuff in this collection.] ---- BOB (webber@athos.rutgers.edu ; rutgers!athos.rutgers.edu!webber)