Affichage des articles dont le libellé est Histoire. Afficher tous les articles
Affichage des articles dont le libellé est Histoire. Afficher tous les articles
jeudi 27 novembre 2008
Les 50 ans des CACM (Ingenious New Symbolic Optimizer)
Communications of the ACM
Volume 1 , Issue 10 (Oct. 1958)
R.I.N.S.O.
(Real Ingenious New Symbolic Optimizer)
Editor's Note: The following parody on the S.O.A.P. System is reprinted from the September 1958 issue
of the Journal of Machine Accounting, Systems and Management, through the kind permission of
the editor, Mr. Charles Johnson.
RINSO represents the ultimate sophisticated optimizing routine for use with the recently announced
699 Electronuclear Computing Machine. The routine allows any- untrained person with an I.Q. of 40
or more to program any problem capable of definition by the human brain. Logic is taken care of by
RINSO.
With RINSO, it is not necessary for the programmer to know arithmetic or any advanced mathematics.
Nor must he confine himself to the use of English in his choice of symbols. The routine is capable of
interpreting symbols in any of the 98 languages officially recognized by the United Nations, as well as
in Uto-Aztecan and Quarani.
The RINSO deck consists of three cards, one of which may be thrown away if the computer is equipped
with the floating square root device. The only restriction involving the program is that it be written
on a sheet of white paper measuring not more than 4' x 6'
To prepare the machine, first drop three RINSO cards into the slot marked "THINK" on the console
and place the program (s) sheet on the moving conveyor belt. Set the alpha-numeric console switches
to "ANALYZE" and push the button marked "GO".
The output of RINSO consists of a printed form from the 499 Accounting Machine Listing 1) the
program steps in Basic English, 2) an analysis of the program in the light of present-day computing
techniques and 3) a statement of the kind and quantity of raw data necessary to make the 699 System
economically feasible.
Copies of the RINSO deck may be obtained by writing to: Programmer Number 4096, Ivory Tower,
Bellevue Hospital, New York, N. Y.
Histoire de l'enseignement de l'informatique
scientifiques des lycées dans les années 1985 la partie informatique et
société était présente de la seconde à la terminale. J'avais pris un grand
plaisir, à propos du programme de cette option, à construire des boucles
itératives de façon prouvée, c'était passionnant intellectuellement. Mais
la loi info et liberté, encore jeune à l'époque, (je parle de la loi, pas
de moi) m'avait aussi passionné." écrit un enseignant retraité.
" construire des boucles itératives de façon prouvée"
On en est bien loin de nos jours avec les informaticiens "nouvelle génération" !
Interrogez les Bac +++++ en informatique.
Armorhistel, histoire des télécommunications, passée, présente et future
L'association a pour devise celle d’Otto de Habsbourg, député Européen :
« Une société qui oublie ses racines, qui n’a plus
de mémoire collective, est comme une famille
qui perd son âme »
et l'histoire française : http://www.aconit.org/histoire/colloques/chi04/pichon.pdf
Columbia University Computing History (A Chronology of Computing at Columbia University)
par Frank da Cruz
et des choses qui ont eu une importance colossale sur l'histoire de notre planète.
Excellent et captivant.
Merci à Frank da Cruz
Extraits :
"Jan 1939:
Enrico Fermi, Leo Szilard, Walter Zinn, Herbert Anderson, and others begin work on nuclear fission in Columbia's Pupin Hall. Within a few months this work would become the Manhattan Project, funded by President Roosevelt (Columbia Law, 1905-07) in response to Albert Einstein's letter warning of Nazi research in this area. After Pearl Harbor, the project moved to the University of Chicago (supposedly to make it less vulnerable to German attack) and spread to the University of California, Los Alamos, Oak Ridge, Hanford, and other locations. Fermi's lab was in the same building as Professor Eckert's Astronomical Computing Bureau. I don't know to what degree, if any, Eckert's computing machines were employed in the early Manhattan Project, but as noted below they played a key role in 1945 in the final preparations for the first A-bombs [57]. A number of other Columbia scientists worked on the project, including I.I. Rabi, Edward Teller, John Dunning (who identified U-235 as the fissionable uranium isotope using the Pupin cyclotron in Feb 1940), Harold Urey (who later left the project on moral grounds), and George Pegram (who assembled the original Manhattan Project team), as well as junior faculty who would later become well-known physicists, such as C.S. Wu and Bill Havens (both of whom I worked for in my student days), James Rainwater, Eugene Booth, and Richard Present. The following is taken from a narrative, Evolving from Calculators to Computers on the Los Alamos National Laboratory History website (May 2003):
Calculations at Los Alamos were originally done on manually operated mechanical calculators, which was not only laborious and time-consuming, but the machines broke down frequently under heavy use. The only one who could fix them promptly was Richard Feynman (Nobel Prize in Physics, 1965), which some thought was not the best use of his time. "Dana Mitchell, whom Laboratory Director J. Robert Oppenheimer had recruited from Columbia University to oversee procurement for Los Alamos, recognized that the calculators were not adequate for the heavy computational chores and suggested the use of IBM punched-card machines. He had seen them used successfully by Wallace Eckert at Columbia to calculate the orbits of planets and persuaded [Stanley] Frankel and [Eldred] Nelson to order a complement of them.
"The new IBM punched-card machines were devoted to calculations to simulate implosion, and Metropolis and Feynman organized a race between them and the hand-computing group. 'We set up a room with girls in it. Each one had a Marchant. But one was the multiplier, and another was the adder, and this one cubed, and all she did was cube this number and send it to the next one,' said Feynmann. For one day, the hand computers kept up: 'The only difference was that the IBM machines didn't get tired and could work three shifts. But the girls got tired after a while.'"
[...]
Mar 1945:
Now that Germany's defeat was imminent, Leo Szilard — who, with Enrico Fermi, had initiated the Manhattan Project at Columbia in 1939 — did not believe the A-bomb should be used on Japan. He obtained a letter of introduction to President Roosevelt from Albert Einstein so he could present his case against dropping the bomb. A preliminary meeting with Eleanor Roosevelt was set up for May 8th, but the President died on April 12th and Szilard was blocked from contacting President Truman.
8 May 1945:
VE Day, Germany surrenders, the war in Europe ends.
Jul 1945:
Szilard wrote and circulated a petition among his fellow scientists at the University of Chicago against the use of atomic weapons and asking President Truman not to use them on Japan. He also sent copies to Oak Ridge and Los Alamos for circulation (the Los Alamos copy was buried by Groves and Oppenheimer). Szilard's petition went through several drafts; the first one (July 3rd) included the following text:
Atomic bombs are primarily a means for the ruthless annihilation of cities. Once they were introduced as an instrument of war it would be difficult to resist for long the temptation of putting them to such use. The last few years show a marked tendency toward increasing ruthlessness. At present our Air Forces, striking at the Japanese cities, are using the same methods of warfare which were condemned by American public opinion only a few years ago when applied by the Germans to the cities of England. Our use of atomic bombs in this war would carry the world a long way further on this path of ruthlessness.
Subsequent drafts were toned down a bit but made the same recommendations. The Oak Ridge petition urged that "before this weapon be used without restriction in the present conflict, its powers should be adequately described and demonstrated, and the Japanese nation should be given the opportunity to consider the consequences of further refusal to surrender". Watson Lab staff who were performing calculations for Los Alamos were unaware of the petitions or, indeed (with only two exceptions, Eckert and Grosch, the only ones with security clearances), that the calculations were for a bomb [59]. In any event, the petitions never reached the President.
6 Aug 1945:
Hiroshima: "Now we knew what we had been working on" [57]. A second A-bomb was dropped on Nagasaki August 9th. More than 200,000 people died from the two blasts."
jeudi 6 novembre 2008
dimanche 5 octobre 2008
The Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative (CDLI)
http://www.cdli.ucla.edu/?section=collections
The Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative (CDLI) represents the efforts of an international group of Assyriologists, museum curators and historians of science to make available through the internet the form and content of cuneiform tablets dating from the beginning of writing, ca. 3350 BC, until the end of the pre-Christian era. We estimate the number of these documents currently kept in public and private collections to exceed 500,000 exemplars, of which now nearly 225,000 have been catalogued in electronic form by the CDL
Fantastique !
The Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative (CDLI) represents the efforts of an international group of Assyriologists, museum curators and historians of science to make available through the internet the form and content of cuneiform tablets dating from the beginning of writing, ca. 3350 BC, until the end of the pre-Christian era. We estimate the number of these documents currently kept in public and private collections to exceed 500,000 exemplars, of which now nearly 225,000 have been catalogued in electronic form by the CDL
Fantastique !
mercredi 24 septembre 2008
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