Gustav Brock
Gustav at cactus.dk
Sat Jun 21 15:53:57 CDT 2008
Hi John Really? I perhaps expected that some knew about these machines - I only recall the name Ferranti from Ferranti Semiconductor - but that you actually attended the celebration and know the Ferranti Mark 1 that good is quite a surprise! What a drive on Memory Lane it must have been. It is fascinating to hear what these machines were capable of given the modest storage and computing resources. It is only a few days ago I sat wondering why my Vista machine consumes 80 GB of diskspace with only VS2008, SQL Server local, and Office 2007 installed. Once a pc had 30 MB of harddisk space and a 4.77 MHZ CPU - that is about 1/2500(!) and 1/1000. I noticed the Wikipedia has much info on Ferranti should anyone else be interested: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ferranti Thanks for the insight John! /gustav >>> djkr at msn.com 21-06-2008 19:06 >>> Well spotted, Gustav. I was at the celebration last night at Manchester University. I am too young to have had anything to do with the original, but did get my first program working on the Ferranti Mark 1* just over 46 years ago. Even integer division (no floating-point at all!) had to be programmed, yet the machine I used spent much of its time doing matrix arithmetic, calculating the stresses and strains in an aircraft wing during take-off. I also used a powerful successor, Atlas, at MU, when the Atlas Bureau Service first opened in (?)January 1963; I was refining a technique for finding the roots of complex transcendental functions - just in case you were about to ask. One of the novel features of Atlas was the One-Level Store (virtual memory), 'invented' many years later by IBM. Hey ho. John -----Original Message----- From: accessd-bounces at databaseadvisors.com [mailto:accessd-bounces at databaseadvisors.com] On Behalf Of Gustav Brock Sent: 21 June 2008 15:35 To: accessd at databaseadvisors.com Subject: [AccessD] OT: "Baby Machine" 60 years today Hi all See the introduction to the forerunner of all modern computers, Baby Machine, which ran a stored program 60 years ago at the University of Manchester, UK. And listen to music played by the Ferranti Mark 1 computer, a commercial version of the Baby Machine. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7458479.stm /gustav