Hello everyone, Hmm, the discovery of those diagrams is good news for EDSAC rebuilders but I was surprised to see that the press release twice calls EDSAC the first practical general purpose computer. One occurrence is in the boilerplate passage on EDSAC at the bottom of the release, which suggests that this is TNMOCs official position. That seems to violate the de facto truce concluded between early computer history enthusiasts in the early 1980s when they settled on the appropriate series of adjectives to go between first and computer. As Mike Williams once wrote, there is more than enough glory in the creation of the modern computer to satisfy all of the early pioneers, most of whom are no longer in a position to care anyway. (That's the introduction to the "The First Computers: History and Architecture" collection from 2000). ENIAC got the metaphorical trophy for first general purpose electronic digital computer in its original 1945 configuration whereas EDSAC went home with the award for first practical stored program computer. This reminds me that the second in my series of articles with Crispin Rope and Mark Priestley about ENIAC and its early-1948 conversion to what has sometimes been called read-only stored program operation was recently published in Annals. We try to switch focus from firsts to questions of practical capabilities, in support of our detailed analysis of ENIACs 1948 Monte Carlo program in the third and final paper, although we do conclude that an entirely practical version of the programming method described in the seminal 1945 First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC was implemented on ENIAC in March-April 1948, some months before the Manchester Baby ran what has usually been considered the first modern program. Williams also noted that, If you add enough adjectives to a description you can always claim your own favorite. For example ENIAC is often claimed to be the first electronic, general purpose, large scale, digital computer and you certainly have to add all those adjectives before you have a correct statement. In our own work we argue that the history is somewhat more complicated than can be captured by those "first [adjective] [adjective] [adjective] computer" phrases, but that doesn't mean that "general purpose" and "stored program" can be conflated. People who care about "firsts" also need to take care with those adjectives. The paper is Thomas Haigh, Mark Priestley & Crispin Rope, Engineering The Miracle of the ENIAC: Implementing the Modern Code Paradigm IEEE Annals of the History of Computing 36:2 (April-June 2014):41-59 and you can read it at http://eniacinaction.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/EngineeringTheMiracleoft heENIAC-scanned.pdf or, if you have access, from the IEEE CS Digital Library at http://www.computer.org/csdl/mags/an/2014/02/man2014020041-abs.html. Our www.EniacInAction.com website already includes a selection of technical documents and primary sources related to ENIAC's conversion and to the Monte Carlo programs it ran in 1948 (though it is not yet complete or attractively presented). Best wishes, Tom From: members-bounces@sigcis.org [mailto:members-bounces@sigcis.org] On Behalf Of B. Randell Sent: Wednesday, June 25, 2014 4:43 AM To: members Cc: B. Randell Subject: [SIGCIS-Members] Fwd: News - Lost EDSAC diagrams reveal secrets of one of the earliest computers Hi: Begin forwarded message: From: Stephen Fleming <stephen.fleming@palam.co.uk> Subject: News - Lost EDSAC diagrams reveal secrets of one of the earliest computers Date: 25 June 2014 09:16:22 BST To: <brian.randell@ncl.ac.uk> Reply-To: <k> NEWS RELEASE Lost EDSAC diagrams reveal secrets of one of the earliest computers 25 June 2014 Some of the earliest diagrams of a computer have been rediscovered more than sixty years after they were drawn and are giving the EDSAC team at The National Museum of Computing fresh insights into their ongoing reconstruction of the world's first general purpose computer. You can read the full release here: http://www.tnmoc.org/news/news-releases/lost-edsac-diagrams-reveal-sec rets-one-earliest-computers Cheers Brian Randell School of Computing Science, Newcastle University, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE1 7RU EMAIL = Brian.Randell@ncl.ac.uk PHONE = +44 191 222 7923 URL = http://www.cs.ncl.ac.uk/people/brian.randell