Ever wonder how they did computing before computers?

[JimJay]

Utterly agree about the replace not repair attitude. Some of the computerization of cars is necessary and useful, a lot is just there to put a tick in the box, JD Powers ran an interesting survey recently showing how unused some "necessary" features are. Working in the industry I get to see some of the customer feedback surveys and it still amazes me how many people pay extra for features they either don't understand, don't use or even later claim not to have while the car has to lug it all around till it gets to the scrap yard. Some of it is also just a con. I won't name the vehicle or the company and it was quite some time ago but I once worked on a car where buying the "sport" version got you a chrome ring on the gear stick, two more on the front door cards and a rubber mat in one of the cubbyholes all for a mere £1000. That was it, no engine mods, no suspension mods but it sold.

Just to return to the original topic of the thread for a moment, once I'd decided that my initial career as a lawyer really wasn't for me I was lucky enough to get into computing and eventually became a technical manager in a large, and now deservedly-defunct, computer organisation. We had a range of machines (this was well before the days of PCs) costing many thousands of pounds, some of them being upgradeable. However the major upgrades were very expensive and the usual upgrade path was for us to buy back the old machine, which had usually already been upgraded as far as it could go, and sell the unsuspecting punter a factory-refurbished unit higher in the range; this would be delivered to them and then a couple of engineers would spend a day or two "commissioning and installing" it.

I say "unsuspecting" because what the customers didn't know was that the new refurb was actually exactly the same as their old one - the only difference being that a compiler for a different language had been installed (about a ten minute job) and a DIP switch had been flicked in the bowels of the beast. The refurbishment involved vacuuming the insides and respraying the case, and the reason for selling them a refurb was that the profit margin was much higher than that of a new machine, as we were basically just selling them someone else's old machine in a never-ending circle. I did suggest to Sales & Marketing that we could just take their old machine away in the evening, "refurb" it overnight and return it the next morning (or a day or two later) as a different machine but they didn't want to lose the extra profit made from the two days that it ostensibly took for the engineers to carry out their on-site pantomime...

 

[JimJay]

to add to Jim-Jay's answer
we also have a camera to record vehicles for the MOT.....
On our logbook there's no colour mentioned of the vehicle.....
on our's we had to remove the Bull Bars and tow ball for our revisit......just checking they said.....
Mind if u look around here, how some of these vehicles are on the road at all amazes me.....

Back to computors, after visiting car junk yards (recycle centers) over Europe most are now filled with undamaged vehicles.....it's just unrepairable electronic faults or to costly to fix....
which is just great for the planet...

my vehicle would perhaps get around 10-15mpg better if it were electronicaly controlled ......
but for HOW LONG.....????? no thanks.....

That's interesting - I never had to take my bull bars off for the MOT but I did have a minor encounter with a boulder on a dark road. The bars took the very slight impact but seemed to distort more than I thought they would. When I got home I decided to take them off to see what had happened. I bought the car new and the bars were fitted by the main dealer and had the cosmetic plastic nut covers fitted: it turned out that the nuts holding them on weren't stainless steel, as they would have been had I fitted them myself, and indeed weren't even metal - they were bl**dy plastic/nylon! I wasn't too impressed, to put it mildly......

 

[Ozi]

I'm the same age as you and I can vividly remember endlessly reciting the times table up to 12 or so when in Primary School and that has undoubtedly enabled me to be able to add and subtract in my head many times faster than using a calculator to this day... 60+ years later.

Although I was considered quite bright and had an accelerated education and went to a Private School, I failed miserably at exams . When I decided in my late 20s to go to Uni to study Architecture I had to study and pass 0 levels and A levels and an HND before managing to to get entrance to the Oxford School of Architecture. It was quite a shock to find by then that everything was now Metric which seemed totally alien at first but by the time I got to HND Construction studies I loved it . Bought my first scientific calculator Casio fx-3600P which has now been in use for over 40 years and still works despite being run over by a car 20 years ago.! I received a free mature student grant of several thousand pounds a year back in 1980 which enabled me, as a student ,to run a car and rent 2x flats as well . How lucky we were eh !

Like your Wife, I am still able to manage complex structural Engineering calculations and even troubleshoot complex Electronic auto Fuel injection and ignition systems but find many simple basic tasks a real struggle ....

I fear that in comparison to the high standards of education in other European and Far Eastern Education Countries, the UK is badly failing our future generations with this 'dumbed down' multi-choice ,tick-box type education curriculum that we offer our Kids today

Forced my kids to learn tables forwards backwards then random, did silly things like the 9 3/4 times table on long car journeys, made them use maths in everyday life, got them helping with flat pack furniture from about age 3, sent them to a retired teacher one evening a week who taught things the way I was taught, got them through the eleven plus. One day they will chose my nursing home - I'm in for hell.

 

[JimJay]

One day they will chose my nursing home - I'm in for hell.

"Spare the rod and the little beggars will still have it in for you anyway..."

 

[Spectric]

I would say we had scientific calculators from Casio before we had desktop Pc's which really took off in 1982 with the 286 but think of everything that was invented or built pre 1970, log books and slide rules. Go back even further and think of the Victorian era, so many great inventions and achievements all done using just grey mater and mental ability.

 

[J-G]

It's quite odd how a sideways reference can bring back memories. Of course I remember using 4 figure logs and (being a precocious pedant) the joy at finding a book with 9 figure logs !

At the first reference to logs on this thread, little did I think that I would find a need to use them again in a month of Sundays. Imagine my surprise when I found that I needed to determine the order of magnitude of numbers which could be anything from 0.5 to over 1000! Logs base 10 are the perfect mechanism for such a problem - - - just take the integer of the Log and add 1 you are left with 1, 2, 3 or 4 depending the original figure being <1, 1 - <10, 10 - <100 etc.

This would probably not have occured to me had 'Logs' not been mentioned here

 

[PhilipL]

"Slide Rule", by Nevil Shute is a very good read. Early days of airships and their design. Each member had to be stress calculated by hand.

 

[Craig22]

The original meaning of computer is "one who computes" - in other words a person. Richard Feynman in one of his books describes his work at Los Alamos on the Atom Bomb. One of his innovations was a room of people, sitting in an array. Each would perform a simple calculation with at most ten steps on a mechanical calculator (add, subtract multiply and divide only) and pass the result on. Depending on the result it would be passed in a certain direction. A human parallel computer. Using that he reduced the calculation time from three months to a few days.

So before our modern definition of a computer, they were people.

Going further back, Charles Babbage worked first on human computers to improve the accuracy of log tables

"In Babbage's time, printed mathematical tables were calculated by human computers; in other words, by hand. They were central to navigation, science and engineering, as well as mathematics. Mistakes were known to occur in transcription as well as calculation.

In 1812 he was sitting in his rooms in the Analytical Society looking at a table of logarithms, which he knew to be full of mistakes, when the idea occurred to him of computing all tabular functions by machinery. The French government had produced several tables by a new method. Three or four of their mathematicians decided how to compute the tables, half a dozen more broke down the operations into simple stages, and the work itself, which was restricted to addition and subtraction, was done by eighty computers who knew only these two arithmetical processes. Here, for the first time, mass production was applied to arithmetic, and Babbage was seized by the idea that the labours of the unskilled computers [people] could be taken over completely by machinery which would be quicker and more reliable."

Lots of stuff about the Difference Engine and the Analytic Engine that resulted in the Wikipedia article (from which the above is an extract). There is also mention of Ada Lovelace, who worked with Babbage and is credited with being the first computer programmer, having written a process for calculating Bernoulli numbers. Interestingly she was the daughter of the poet Lord Byron.

 

[MamTor]

I found this fascinating - how fire control computers worked in navy battleships in WW2.

Using cams, gears, differentials and other types of mechanics to do maths - some of it pretty advanced.



Part 2

Thanks, that's very interesting.
One of the big breakthroughs in computing was the creation of the 're-programmable electronic storage' computer. This is essentially the same concept that we're all still using today. It dates back to 1948 from the University of Manchester but relied on various ex-army components such as the radar tube to provide electronic memory.

 

[J-G]

There is also mention of Ada Lovelace, who worked with Babbage and is credited with being the first computer programmer, having written a process for calculating Bernoulli numbers.

Probably more important than Babbage - she understood the concept that the Difference/Analytic Engine could be used for much more than calculating Log Tables - she even considered that it could write music!!

Being a woman (even the daughter of a Lord!) meant that she has been sidelined just as Joan Clarke (Bletchley) and Rosalind Franklin (DNA) have been.

 

[Craig22]

The Babbage Analytic Engine is what is known as "Turing Complete". In other words it was a general purpose computer in the same sense as the Universal Turing Machine is. It was also punch card programmed. So it anticipated the reprogrammable electronic storage computer by a century.

The storage element in the first general purpose true electronic computers, which used valves, was a mercury filled delay line. The digital signal was launched, and was read out at the end. Of course new and modified data could then be loaded.

"Co-inventor of the ENIAC machine, J. Presper Eckert who worked on mercury-filled tubes for reducing clutter in WWII radar systems, adapted and in 1947 filed for a patent on their application to data storage. In May 1949, Maurice Wilkes built EDSAC (Electronic Delay Storage Automatic Calculator), the first full-size stored-program computer, at the University of Cambridge Mathematical Laboratory, England with 512 35-bit words of memory, stored in 32 mercury delay lines holding 576 bits each. The first UNIVAC computer shipped to the U.S. Census Bureau in 1951 included seven 1.5 KB memory units with an average access time of 222 microseconds. Each unit held 18 mercury-filled tubes weighing a total of nearly 800 lbs"

 

[J-G]

The Babbage Analytic Engine is what is known as "Turing Complete". In other words it was a general purpose computer in the same sense as the Universal Turing Machine is. It was also punch card programmed. So it anticipated the reprogrammable electronic storage computer by a century.

Yes but Babbage himself did not understand that!

The concept of a 're-programmable' device - a series of 'Punched Cards' - pre-dates Babbage who only expanded upon the work of Joseph Marie Jaquard (1804) who in turn improved upon the work of Basile Bouchon (1725).

Herman Hollerith's work in the 1880s also relied upon Jaquard's work and his company eventually became - - - - IBM.

It's somewhat sobering to remember that I have in fact used punch-cards to write Computer Programs in COBOL !!

 

[Craig22]

I suspect that Ada Lovelace had a more complete understanding of the generality of the Analytic Engine than Babbage did.

I'm also old and crusty enough to have used punched cards on an ICL machine that used core store.

 

[Pedronicus]

I'm also old and crusty enough to have used punched cards on an ICL machine that used core store.

Ahh, those were the days. I used to get a friend of mine who worked in one of the high street bank's computer department to bring me home bags of chads so that I could use them as roof tiles for the buildings I built for the model railway.

 

[J-G]

I suspect that Ada Lovelace had a more complete understanding of the generality of the Analytic Engine than Babbage did.

From what I've read/heard I'm sure that's an understatement

I'm also old and crusty enough to have used punched cards on an ICL machine that used core store.

If I remember correctly mine was also an ICL - PDP11 I believe, with a 'Stack' of 15" Dia. Disks amounting to less than a megabyte.

 

[Sandyn]

ICL - PDP11

An ICL PDPP11!!!, Bloody luxury. When I were a lad we were so poor, I used to get up at 2am Cut down a tree , saw it up into logs, then using a blunt kitchen knife, carve all the bits to make an abacus. I worked for 20 hours in the local bank doing all the calculations for a farthing a week. When I got home at night, my mother would throw the abacus on the fire to heat the porridge.

 

[AES]

An ICL PDPP11!!!, Bloody luxury. When I were a lad we were so poor, I used to get up at 2am Cut down a tree , saw it up into logs, then using a blunt kitchen knife, carve all the bits to make an abacus. I worked for 20 hours in the local bank doing all the calculations for a farthing a week. When I got home at night, my mother would throw the abacus on the fire to heat the porridge.

I don't think I really believe this "story" Sandyn!

 

[Jonm]

This is a very interesting thread. I'm 72 apparently, though how that came about so quickly is a mystery to me

I can remember as a child, looking forward to a future event and saying “ I wish it was .........”. My mother’s response was “ don’t wish your life away, it will pass soon enough“. How right she was.

 

[Sandyn]

This is a very interesting thread. I'm 72 apparently, though how that came about so quickly is a mystery to me,

People kept telling me that time passes faster when you get older. I now believe it. It's all to do with the accelerating expansion of the universe.

 

[Jonm]

It's all to do with the accelerating expansion of the universe

So does that mean that perceived time passes faster for children now compared to when I was a child?