[SC.LUG] EDSAC nostalgia - from Fwd: [Queuenews-html] [QueueNews] Will the Real Bots Stand Up?

[Richard Smedley]

Ah, nostalgia. ;-)
[and with apologies for the loss of formatting]

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Subject: Fwd: [Queuenews-html] [QueueNews] Will the Real Bots Stand Up?
Date: Tuesday 16 January 2007 22:33
From: Richard Smedley <rs at m6-it.org>
To: rs at m6-it.org

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[massive snip]

New article on ACM Queue:
Will the Real Bots Stand Up?


AI and robotics dreams continue to frustrate us...

by Stan Kelly-Bootle, Author

From the Computer Architecture issue, vol. 4, no. 10 - December 2006 /
 January 2007 Latest Developer Jobs
  ·   Research Contest
  ·   Software Engineering
  ·   Associate/ Full Professor, Chair Computer Science
  ·   Lecturer in Computer Sci. and Software Engineering
  ·   Asst./ Assoc. Professor - Computer Science (MSCS)
   article excerpt:


When asked which advances in computing technology have most dazzled me
since I first coaxed the Cambridge EDSAC 1 1 into fitful leaps of
calculation in the 1950s, I must admit that Apple's iPod sums up the
many unforeseen miracles in one amazing, iconic gadget. Unlike those
electrical nose-hair clippers and salt 'n' pepper mills (batteries not
included) that gather dust after a few shakes, my iPod lives literally
near my heart, on and off the road, in and out of bed like a versatile
lover - except when it's recharging and downloading in the piracy of my
own home.2 I was an early iPod convert and remain staggered by the fact
that I can pop 40 GB of mobile plug-and-play music and words in my
shirt pocket. I don't really mind if the newer models are 80 GB or
slightly thinner or can play movies; 40 GB copes easily with my music
and e-lecture needs. Podcasts add a touch of potluck and
serendipity-doo-dah. Broadcasts from the American public radio stations
that I've missed since moving back to England now reach my iPod
automatically via free subscriptions and Apple's iTunes software. I've
learned to live with that pandemic of "i-catching" prefixes to the
point where I've renamed Robert Graves's masterwork "iClaudius," but I
digress. The functional "completeness" of the audio iPod stems from its
ideal marriage of hardware and software. The compactness is just right,
respecting the scale of human manipulations. The Dick Tracy wristwatch
vade mecum failed through over-cram and under-size. The iPod succeeds
with a legible alphanumeric screen and that senile-proof, uncluttered,
almost minimal, click-wheel user interface. This avoids the input
plague of most portable gadgets such as phones, calculators, and PDAs:
the minuscule keyboards and buttons. I hasten to deflect the wrath of
my daughter-in-law Peggy Sadler and all who have mastered and swear by
the Palm Pilot stylus! The click wheel offers circular, serial access
to and selection of your titles, but that's a decent compromise when
you ponder the problems of searching by keywords. Spoken commands
remain, as always, waiting for the next reassuring "breakthrough." I'll
return anon to other Next-Big-Fix-Release promises. Meanwhile, adding
still-life pictures, such as cover art, may retain the iPod's simple
"completeness," but pushing the device to TV seems to me to break the
spell of sound gimcrackery [sic]. Peering at tiny moving pictures is a
pointless pain, whereas even modestly priced earphones provide the
superb hi-fi we used to dream about when growing up. The
near-exponential improvement of every computing power-performance
parameter - physical size, clock speed, storage capacity, and
bandwidth, to name the obvious features - is now a cliché of our fair
trade. Yet even my older readers3 may need reminding just how bleak
things were almost 60 years ago as the world's first stored-program
machine (note the Cambridge-chauvinistic singular) moved into action.
The house-size EDSAC was effectively a single-user personal computer -
a truly general computing factotum, but as Rossini's Figaro warns:
Ahime, che furia! Ahime, que folla! Uno alla volta, per carità!
(Heavens, what mayhem! Goodness, what crowds! One at a time, for pity's
sake!) Originally (1947) EDSAC boasted [sic] 512 words of main memory
stored in 16 ultrasonic mercury-delay-line tanks, cleverly known as
"long" tanks because they were longer than the short tanks used for
registers. On the bright side, as we used to quip, each of the 512
words was 18 bits! Forget the word count, feel the width! Alas, for
technical reasons, only 17 of the 18 bits were accessible. By 1952, the
number of long tanks had doubled, providing a dizzy total of 1-KB
words. Input/output was via five-track paper tape, which therefore also
served as mass [sic again] storage. Subject only to global timber
production, one might see this as virtually unlimited mass storage,
although access was strictly slow-serial via 20-characters-per-second
tape readers and 10-characters-per-second teletype printers. (By 1958,
with EDSAC 2 taking over, paper tape and printer speeds had risen and
magnetic tapes had become the standard backup and mass storage medium.)
Although hindsight and nostalgia can distort, one still looks back with
an old soldier's pride at the feats achieved with what seem now to be
ridiculously frugal resources. Maurice Wilkes, David Wheeler, and Stan
Gill had written the first book on programming.4 This revered,
pioneering trio are generally acknowledged as the co-inventors of the
subroutine and relocatable code. As with all the most sublime of
inventions, it's difficult to imagine the world without a call/return
mechanism. Indeed, I meet programmers, whose parasitic daily bread is
earned by invoking far-flung libraries, who have never paused to ponder
with gratitude that the subroutine concept needed the brightest heaven
of invention. Although no patents for the basic subroutine mechanism
were sought (or even available) back then, a further sign of changing
times is that patents are now routinely [sic] awarded for variations on
the call/return mechanism, as well as for specific subroutines.5 David
Wheeler died suddenly in 2004 after one of his daily bicycle rides to
the Cambridge Computer Labs. It's quite Cantabrigian to "die with your
clips on." I had the sad pleasure of attending David's memorial service
and learning more of his extensive work in many areas of computing.6
Other innovations from the Cambridge Mathematical Laboratory in the
early 1950s included Wilkes's paper introducing the concept of
microprogramming. On a more playful note was the XOX program written by
my supervisor A. S. (Sandy) Douglas. This played (and never lost!)
tic-tac-toe (also known as OXO) - a seemingly trivial pursuit, yet one
with enormous, unpredicted consequences. XOX was the very first
computer game with an interactive CRT display, the challenge being not
the programming logic, of course, but the fact that the CRT was
designed and wired for entirely different duties. Little could anyone
guess then that games and entertainment would become the dominant and
most demanding applications for computers. Can anyone gainsay this
assertion? One would need to add up all the chips, MIPS, terabytes, and
kid-hours (after defining kid), so I feel safe in my claim. Discuss! If
you insist, I can offer a weaselly cop-out: Games and entertainment are
now among the most dominant and demanding applications for computers.
Read the rest of this article at acmqueue.com




-- 
Richard Smedley,                                         rs at m6-it.org
Technical Director,                                     www.M6-IT.org
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