Overall it was a very good and fun article. I liked the interspersing of math, logic and computers.
It seemed to be very USA focused, and missed a lot of the work done in other countries, especially the work of Konrad Zuse and things like the ACE computer in England.and the EDSAC (the first computer to store its program in its own memory) designed by my friend, Sir Maurice Wilkes..but to cover all that would probably go on to fill tomes if printed out.
You also missed out on the Colossus Computer, designed and built by Tommy Flowers at Bletchley Park as part of the famous code breaking operation of WW II. I mention it because it used vacuum tubes to give a great boost to code breaking operations over the electro-mechanical BOMBAs designed and built by Alan Turing.
You also did not mention the Mark I and Mark II computers built by Howard Aiken and IBM to do ballistics in WW II. It was on the Mark II computer that Lieutenant Grace Murray Hopper (later to rise to the rank of Rear Admiral) located the first “bug” in a computer, a moth that flew in through an open window and was trapped in the contacts of a relay.
Lt. Hopper went ton to develop FLOMATIC, the first “high level” language, which led to the design of COBOL. Lt. Hopper also worked on the ENIAC, so there also is a connection there. Dr. Hopper was another friend of mine, and an inspiration to me and many other computer people.
I do quibble about the statement that the transistor seemed to be an “evolution” over the tube, but the integrated circuit was a “revolution”. I doubt that we would have been able to build, power and cool computers of the size and complexity of the IBM mainframes in the late sixties if we had to rely on tubes to run them, and certainly it would have been more difficult to build integrated circuits out of tubes. Perhaps you could concede that both transistors and integrated circuits were revolutionary...it is ok to have two (or more) revolutionary items, just as it is possible to have more than one hero.
Overall it was a very good and fun article. I liked the interspersing of math, logic and computers.
It seemed to be very USA focused, and missed a lot of the work done in other countries, especially the work of Konrad Zuse and things like the ACE computer in England.and the EDSAC (the first computer to store its program in its own memory) designed by my friend, Sir Maurice Wilkes..but to cover all that would probably go on to fill tomes if printed out.
You also missed out on the Colossus Computer, designed and built by Tommy Flowers at Bletchley Park as part of the famous code breaking operation of WW II. I mention it because it used vacuum tubes to give a great boost to code breaking operations over the electro-mechanical BOMBAs designed and built by Alan Turing.
You also did not mention the Mark I and Mark II computers built by Howard Aiken and IBM to do ballistics in WW II. It was on the Mark II computer that Lieutenant Grace Murray Hopper (later to rise to the rank of Rear Admiral) located the first “bug” in a computer, a moth that flew in through an open window and was trapped in the contacts of a relay.
Lt. Hopper went ton to develop FLOMATIC, the first “high level” language, which led to the design of COBOL. Lt. Hopper also worked on the ENIAC, so there also is a connection there. Dr. Hopper was another friend of mine, and an inspiration to me and many other computer people.
I do quibble about the statement that the transistor seemed to be an “evolution” over the tube, but the integrated circuit was a “revolution”. I doubt that we would have been able to build, power and cool computers of the size and complexity of the IBM mainframes in the late sixties if we had to rely on tubes to run them, and certainly it would have been more difficult to build integrated circuits out of tubes. Perhaps you could concede that both transistors and integrated circuits were revolutionary...it is ok to have two (or more) revolutionary items, just as it is possible to have more than one hero.