Imagine ....
.... being there when they boot it up and hearing it play its startup tune for the first time in decades. Awesome!
The United Kingdom's National Museum of Computing has begun the process of booting up a replica of the Electronic Delay Storage Automatic Calculator – aka EDSAC – a computer commissioned in 1949. As The Reg has previously detailed, EDSAC has a distinguished place in computing history because its design influenced that of LEO, …
They say they are trying for an authentic reconstruction without, as far as possible, using 'modern' components. So where do the valves, huge resistors, paper capacitors etc come from. I would like to imagine gently rotting, abandoned warehouses full of WWII spares but I can't.
Oh, and zdnet has a rather good picture of the new EDSAC's boot ROM (which is a bit of a mechanical phone exchange)
http://www.zdnet.com/national-museum-of-computing-opens-edsac-display-recreating-1949s-top-computer-7000036216/
The boot ROM is one of those details that makes EDSAC so brilliant. Everyone else building computers at the time thought that building an electronic computer was an impressive achievement by itself. The EDSAC team also thought through what else was needed to let other people in the university to do something useful with it - so they invented boot ROMs and subroutines and so on.
In 1967 I started programming a Ferranti Argus minicomputer. It had a primitive assembler that alllowed addresses such as v12, v13, etc. So not a fully fledged assembler by the standards of the contemporary IBM 1620, another machine I used.
I later learned that EDSAC programs were written in a similar primitive assembler: clearly an ancesral work.
Neither EDSAC nor Argus had floating point hardware, so for science and engineering calculations you had to understand scaled fraction arithmetic. Not many people did.
> Neither EDSAC nor Argus had floating point hardware, so for science and engineering calculations you had to understand scaled fraction arithmetic. Not many people did.
Not many people understand floating point to this day, but that doesn't stop them from programming stuff that depends on that understanding. Von Neumann considered F.P. suspect, at least initially, and his similar dismissal of "computing" "random numbers" is oddly apt today, as such things as the gaffed eliptic curves are made known.
There are lessons that can be learned when you program in that environment - lessons that many modern programmers never had to learn, such as how to write "Hello World" and produce an program image that's less than 10Mb ... or an operating system that's under 500Mb (hello Lollypop).
I came late to the art of programming but I can remember the challenges of writing bootstrap code that fit into a 1702 EPROM - and the joy when I succeeded.
Are you sure about that? Seems improbably high to me.
For context, the Z80 ran at 3Mhz in the mid-70s (or thereabouts). That's less than an order of magnitude more after 25 years of unbelievably rapid development. The Z80 chip was smaller than a postage stamp, as opposed to a wheezing hulk taking up a large room.
500Hz, on the other hand, I could well believe...
"EDSAC ran at 500kHz"
Are you sure about that? Seems improbably high to me.
Yes, it really was that fast in terms of clock speed at least: the comparison with most later machines isn't really valid, since EDSAC was a serial machine working one bit at a time rather than in entire words. As a result each instruction took several hundred clocks to execute.
Sorry to disappoint everyone - the article got one key basic fact completely wrong. This is not the original EDSAC - most of that lies at the bottom of the council tip near Cambridge.
This is a very accurate replica, created over the last 4 years by a team of volunteers from almost nothing but a series of old monochrome photographs of the original machine. Just the detective work to do that was extremely impressive.
We hope to have it running fully by the end of 2015.
Meanwhile visit http://www.edsac.org and in particular have a look at the excellent series of videos made by David Allen, who produced the BBC's ground-breaking series of educational TV programmes featuring the BBC Micro back in the 1980s, and which introduced a whole generation to computing in the UK.
Parts? Well, there ARE big warehouses full of valves - they are not the problem. But value bases (holders) in good condition are much harder to come by. And the trouble with other components is that resistors drift from their nominal value with age, and capacitors can deteriorate to the point where they are either unreliable or downright dangerous! So we use the largest, most authentic-looking, over-rated components we can find! The machine also uses about 1,000 tiny induction coils - our first challenge was to find a special winding machine capable of making these!
Authenticity is very important to the team. Compromises are sometimes forced upon us, but we try to be as faithful to the original as we can be. Our chief engineer is a stickler for authenticity!