Yet more interesting reading on Britain’s contribution to early computing.

[Ace] ran for the first time on 10 May 1950. By modern standards it was sluggish but in its day was the fastest in the world.

And, whilst investigating how it could be used, the team uncovered another problem that looked set to dog greater use of computers – how accurate were they?

“When you put decimal numbers in a computer they have to be converted to binary,” said Professor Maurice Cox, who also worked on Ace and its descendants. “The conversion is not exact.”

“Errors in the data can build up,” said Professor Cox. “Those errors can explode if you have an unstable method of calculation.”

Jim Wilkinson took on and defeated that uncertainty. Remembered with affection by everyone that worked with him, his work has been overshadowed by Turing.

“He was brilliant in his own right,” said Clive Hall, a former colleague of Mr Wilkinson and who oversees some of the computer archives at NPL. “The problem was that he came to NPL when Alan Turing was there.”

By splitting data into packets and threading them on the same line, the carrying capacity of that link could be boosted and the whole network made more powerful.

Roger Scantlebury, who worked with Dr Davies, presented the ideas about “packet switching” to a conference in the US, where they were picked up by the creators of the nascent Arpanet, the fledgling internet.

Does that mean Britain invented the internet?

“Yes and no,” said Mr Scantlebury. “Certainly the underlying technology of the internet, which is packet switching, we did invent.”

Chalk another couple of milestones up to the Brits.

8 Feb 2010 #

The BBC has a couple of interesting articles about the start of the computer age in the UK.  The first is on the Small Scale Experimental Machine (SSEM, more commonly known as Baby), developed at Manchester University and the world’s first programmable computer.  The second covers the Edsac computer developed in Cambridge with funding from Lyon’s (the cake makers), which helped start the use of computers in business.

4 Feb 2010

I argued in comments in a post on another site recently that by allowing websites that use Flash to only work as Apps via their store we’re removing one proprietary format and replacing it with not only a proprietary format, but an unscrupulous gatekeeper as well.

4 Feb 2010 #

[Drew Westen] uses the following exchange from the first presidential debate between Al Gore and George Bush in 2000 to illustrate the perils of trying to explain to voters what will make them better off:

Gore: “Under the governor’s plan, if you kept the same fee for service that you have now under Medicare, your premiums would go up by between 18% and 47%, and that is the study of the Congressional plan that he’s modelled his proposal on by the Medicare actuaries.”

Bush: “Look, this is a man who has great numbers. He talks about numbers.

“I’m beginning to think not only did he invent the internet, but he invented the calculator. It’s fuzzy math. It’s trying to scare people in the voting booth.”

Mr Gore was talking sense and Mr Bush nonsense – but Mr Bush won the debate. With statistics, the voters just hear a patronising policy wonk, and switch off.

For Mr Westen, stories always trump statistics, which means the politician with the best stories is going to win: “One of the fallacies that politicians often have on the Left is that things are obvious, when they are not obvious.

“Obama’s administration made a tremendous mistake by not immediately branding the economic collapse that we had just had as the Republicans’ Depression, caused by the Bush administration’s ideology of unregulated greed. The result is that now people blame him.”

31 Jan 2010 #

What with tablets making a resurgence, is this another nail in the coffin for e-readers?

One small point to note is that they can release it on as many platforms as they like but if it isn’t compatible with the formats stores sell in (and I’m betting it won’t display Kindle formatted books) it won’t make any difference.

26 Jan 2010 #