All - I was at the HNF in early 2015 for research. The staff and the space are both fantastic. This exhibit wasn't running at that time, but it looks to be part of their life-sized ENIAC "model." They have enough floor space set aside so a visitor can walk inside the machine as one might have in the 1940s. Although there are very few artifacts or interactive panels, it does help one appreciate the actual magnitude of the computer. I assume this reconstruction helps fill out the rest of the picture. To directly address Mark's question, RE: exhibiting the essence machine programming, I felt that many of the HNF exhibits focused on tackling the encoding of information through history - ancient record keeping, Morse code, Jacquard loom - which leads up to the ENIAC installation. That's likely the through line here. I like the thought of conveying more abstract concepts like conditional branching and functional programming /Schmüdde On 11/18/16 11:36 AM, members-request@lists.sigcis.org wrote:
Date: Fri, 18 Nov 2016 16:36:12 +0000 From: Mark Priestley <m.priestley@gmail.com> To: Sigcis <members@sigcis.org> Subject: Re: [SIGCIS-Members] Fwd: CCS News - 2016 Tony Sale Award winner Message-ID: <CAHWAic2n0bpEqicTrpUFibXQM3RWumDZ6zHWn0HA4AJrwG0Cqw@mail.gmail.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
Hello list,
That looks like a nice exhibit, but I must admit that the video leaves me wondering just what insight it gives into programming ENIAC, as opposed to operating it. It looks like the demonstrator is setting up operations on the exhibit one at a time, and then executing them by hand. Actual ENIAC usage, of course, involved setting up a whole series of instructions at once (including loops, conditional branches etc) and then letting them execute automatically.
ENIAC "programmers" - more properly, perhaps, the machine's developers, the scientists who used it, and the operators who helped them - used a variety of graphical notations to plan these set-ups. An simple example is at http://markpriestley.net/akg.pdf - this diagram shows exactly how to set the switches and plug the wires to calculate n, n^2 and n^3, stopping before an overflow happens. Even with a simulator, this is quite hard to follow ...
The same goes for other reconstructions, in my experience. For example, watching the Colossus rebuild working at Bletchley Park is a wonderful experience, but gives little insight into many aspects of what the machine was doing, or what it was capable of. Does anyone know of museum exhibits that successfully convey something about programming, or it is just too abstract an activity?
Cheers, Mark
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