TEMPUS Magazine redefines time, giving you a glimpse into all things sophisticated, compelling, vibrant, with its pages reflecting the style, luxury and beauty of the world in which we live. A quarterly publication for private aviation enthusiasts.
Issue link: http://tempus-magazine.epubxp.com/i/447005
75 1934 an experimental system that used more than three thousand tubes to control connections among a thousand phone lines. He also pioneered the use of vacuum tubes for data storage. Turing enlisted Flowers to help on the bombe machines and then introduced him to Newman. Flowers realized that the only way to analyze the German encrypted streams quickly enough was to store at least one of them into the internal electronic memory of a machine rather than trying to compare two punched paper tapes. Tis would require 1,500 vacuum tubes. At frst the Bletchley Park managers were skeptical, but Flowers pushed ahead, and by December 1943—after only eleven months—he produced the frst Colossus machine. An even bigger version, using 2,400 vacuum tubes, was ready by June 1, 1944. Its frst decoded intercepts supported other sources informing General Dwight Eisenhower, who was about to launch the D-Day invasion, that Hitler was not ordering extra troops to Normandy. Within a year, eight more Colossus machines were produced. Tis meant that well before ENIAC, which did not become operational until November 1945, the British code breakers had built a fully electronic and digital (indeed binary) computer. Te second version, in June 1944, was even capable of some conditional branching. But unlike ENIAC, which had ten times the number of tubes, Colossus was a special-purpose machine geared for code breaking, not a general-purpose computer. With its limited programmability, it could not be instructed to perform all computational tasks, the way that (in theory) ENIAC could. S O , W H O I N V E N T E D T H E C O M P U T E R ? In assessing how to apportion credit for creating the computer, it's useful to begin by specifying which attri- butes defne the essence of a computer. In the most gen- eral sense, the defnition of a computer could encompass everything from an abacus to an iPhone. But in chroni- cling the birth of the Digital Revolution, it makes sense to follow the accepted defnitions of what, in modern us- age, constitutes a computer. Here are a few: "A programmable usually electronic device that can store, retrieve, and process data." (Merriam-Webster Dictionary) "An electronic device which is capable of receiving in- formation (data) in a particular form and of performing a sequence of operations in accordance with a predeter- mined but variable set of procedural instructions (pro- gram) to produce a result." (Oxford English Dictionary) "A general purpose device that can be programmed to carry out a set of arithmetic or logical operations auto- matically." (Wikipedia, 2014) So the ideal computer is a machine that is electronic, general purpose, and programmable. What, then, best qualifes as the frst? George Stibitz's Model K, begun on his kitchen table in November 1937, led to a full-scale model at Bell Labs in January 1940. It was a binary computer and the frst such device to be used remotely. But it used electromechani- cal relays and was thus not fully electronic. It was also a special-purpose computer and not programmable. Herman Zuse's Z3, completed in May 1941, was the frst automatically controlled, programmable, electri- cal, binary machine. It was de- signed to do engineering problems rather than be a general-purpose machine. However, it was later shown that, in theory, it could have been used as a Turing-complete machine. Its major difference from modern computers was that it was electromechanical, dependent on clacking and slow relay switches, rather than electronic. Another shortcoming is that it never really went into full-scale service. It was destroyed by the Allied bombing of Berlin in 1943. Te computer designed by John Vincent Atanasoff, which was com- plete but not fully workable by the time Atanasoff abandoned it to serve in the Navy in September 1942, was the world's frst elec- Picayune/States-Item. He joined TIME in 1978 and served as a political correspondent, national editor, and editor of new media before becoming the magazine's fourteenth editor in 1996. He became chairman and CEO of CNN in 2001, and then president and CEO of the Aspen Institute in 2003. He is chair emeritus of Teach for America, which recruits recent college graduates to teach in underserved communities. He was appointed by President Barack Obama and confrmed by the Senate to serve as the chair- man of the Broadcasting Board of Governors, which oversees Voice of America, Radio Free Europe, and other international broadcasts of the United States, a position he held until 2012. He is vice-chair of Partners for a New Beginning, a public-private group tasked with forging ties between the United States and the Muslim world. He is on the board of United Airlines, Tulane University, and the Over- seers of Harvard University. From 2005-2007, after Hurricane Ka- trina, he was the vice-chair of the Louisiana Recovery Authority. CH . 2 T H E I N N O V A T O R S : HOW A GROUP OF HACKERS, GENIUSES AND GEEKS CREATED THE DIGITAL REVOLUTION