[GreenKeys] Bletchley Park...

[Craig Sawyers]

> You might be interested in Australia's SCIRAC computer
> <http://museumvictoria.com.au/CSIRAC/>, the oldest complete computer
> remaining in the worls. It was first built in 1949 and used
> up to 1966,
> when it was stored away. A few years back some of the people
> who worked
> on it restored it back into working condition and it's now on static
> display in Melbourne's museum. A very impressive machine, sadly the
> other first generation computers have been scrapped.
> Don Black.

That is fascinating!

The very first machine, Colossus, of which ten were built for Bletchley Park
during WWII were all destroyed (and the plans) on Churchill's orders.
Although an identical working replica of Colossus is now at Bletchley, it is
not of course an original - not one single component part.  In any event,
Colossus was not a stored programme computer - is used a continous loop of
punched paper tape to hold the cipher text passing a bank of photocells at
60mph.  The sprocket holes were used to generate the clock signal.  It was
really much more like a maths coprocessor running a statistical algorithm
than a general purpose programmable computer.

I was particularly taken by the need to sit down with a SCIRAC programmer so
that your problem could be coded efficiently enough to run in the tiny
memory.  It is very similar today at the computing leading edge -
supercomputers are so arcane to use they can still only be programmed by a
select few - so those trying to work out what goes on near the event horizon
of a black hole, or model two colliding galaxies, or work out protein
dynamics, still need to work with a supercomputer guru to translate the
problem into machine-speak.

Craig