|
Dietrich Prinz
Dietrich Gunther Prinz (March 29, 1903 – December 1989) was a computer science pioneer, notable for his work on early British computers at Ferranti, and in particular for developing the first limited chess program in 1951. Biography Prinz was born in Berlin, Germany, in 1903. He studied physics and mathematics at the University of Berlin where Max Planck and Albert Einstein had been among his teachers. He initially went to work on electronic design at Telefunken. He had some Jewish parentage and left Germany to join GEC in Wembley as a researcher into valve technology. During the Second World War, he was interned in Canada, and when he returned he worked first in Leeds for the Bowen Instrument Company. Prinz became a British citizen in 1947. Prinz was recruited to the Ferranti factory at Moston, Manchester, in 1947 by Eric Grundy who was setting up a team to study the potential uses of electronic computers. After Ferranti was awarded a contract to build a production version ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Science Museum, London
The Science Museum is a major museum on Exhibition Road in South Kensington, London. It was founded in 1857 and is one of the city's major tourist attractions, attracting 3.3 million visitors annually in 2019. Like other publicly funded national museums in the United Kingdom, the Science Museum does not charge visitors for admission, although visitors are requested to make a donation if they are able. Temporary exhibitions may incur an admission fee. It is one of the five museums in the Science Museum Group. Founding and history The museum was founded in 1857 under Bennet Woodcroft from the collection of the Royal Society of Arts and surplus items from the Great Exhibition as part of the South Kensington Museum, together with what is now the Victoria and Albert Museum. It included a collection of machinery which became the ''Museum of Patents'' in 1858, and the ''Patent Office Museum'' in 1863. This collection contained many of the most famous exhibits of what is now t ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Manchester Computers
The Manchester computers were an innovative series of Von Neumann architecture, stored-program Computer, electronic computers developed during the 30-year period between 1947 and 1977 by a small team at the Victoria University of Manchester, University of Manchester, under the leadership of Tom Kilburn. They included the world's first stored-program computer, the world's first transistorised computer, and what was the world's fastest computer at the time of its inauguration in 1962. The project began with two aims: to prove the practicality of the Williams tube, an early form of computer storage, computer memory based on standard cathode-ray tubes (CRTs); and to construct a machine that could be used to investigate how computers might be able to assist in the solution of mathematical problems. The first of the series, the Manchester Baby, ran its first program on 21 June 1948. As the world's first stored-program computer, the Baby, and the Manchester Mark 1 developed from it, ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Cicely Popplewell
Cicely Mary Williams (née Popplewell) 29 October 1920 – 20 June 1995 was a British software engineer who worked with Alan Turing on the Manchester Mark 1 computer. Early life and education Popplewell was born on 29 October 1920 in Stockport, England. Her parents were Bessie (née Fazakerley) and Alfred Popplewell, a chartered accountant. She attended Sherbrook Private Girls School at Greaves Hall in Lancashire. She studied the Mathematical Tripos at the University of Cambridge where she worked with statistics in the form of punched cards. She was considered an expert in the Brunsviga desk calculator. She graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1942, which was converted to a Master of Arts degree in 1949 from Girton College, Cambridge. Career In 1943 she was a Technical Assistant in the Experimental Department at Rolls-Royce Ltd. and joined the Women's Engineering Society. In 1949 Popplewell joined Alan Turing in the Computer Machine Learning department at the Uni ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Italy
Italy ( it, Italia ), officially the Italian Republic, ) or the Republic of Italy, is a country in Southern Europe. It is located in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea, and its territory largely coincides with the homonymous geographical region. Italy is also considered part of Western Europe, and shares land borders with France, Switzerland, Austria, Slovenia and the enclaved microstates of Vatican City and San Marino. It has a territorial exclave in Switzerland, Campione. Italy covers an area of , with a population of over 60 million. It is the third-most populous member state of the European Union, the sixth-most populous country in Europe, and the tenth-largest country in the continent by land area. Italy's capital and largest city is Rome. Italy was the native place of many civilizations such as the Italic peoples and the Etruscans, while due to its central geographic location in Southern Europe and the Mediterranean, the country has also historically been home ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Alan Turing
Alan Mathison Turing (; 23 June 1912 – 7 June 1954) was an English mathematician, computer scientist, logician, cryptanalyst, philosopher, and theoretical biologist. Turing was highly influential in the development of theoretical computer science, providing a formalisation of the concepts of algorithm and computation with the Turing machine, which can be considered a model of a general-purpose computer. He is widely considered to be the father of theoretical computer science and artificial intelligence. Born in Maida Vale, London, Turing was raised in southern England. He graduated at King's College, Cambridge, with a degree in mathematics. Whilst he was a fellow at Cambridge, he published a proof demonstrating that some purely mathematical yes–no questions can never be answered by computation and defined a Turing machine, and went on to prove that the halting problem for Turing machines is undecidable. In 1938, he obtained his PhD from the Department of Mathemati ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
UNIVAC
UNIVAC (Universal Automatic Computer) was a line of electronic digital stored-program computers starting with the products of the Eckert–Mauchly Computer Corporation. Later the name was applied to a division of the Remington Rand company and successor organizations. The BINAC, built by the Eckert–Mauchly Computer Corporation, was the first general-purpose computer for commercial use, but it was not a success. The last UNIVAC-badged computer was produced in 1986. History and structure J. Presper Eckert and John Mauchly built the ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer) at the University of Pennsylvania's Moore School of Electrical Engineering between 1943 and 1946. A 1946 patent rights dispute with the university led Eckert and Mauchly to depart the Moore School to form the Electronic Control Company, later renamed Eckert–Mauchly Computer Corporation (EMCC), based in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. That company first built a computer called BINAC (BINar ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
John Mauchly
John William Mauchly (August 30, 1907 – January 8, 1980) was an American physicist who, along with J. Presper Eckert, designed ENIAC, the first general-purpose electronic digital computer, as well as EDVAC, BINAC and UNIVAC I, the first commercial computer made in the United States. Together they started the first computer company, the Eckert–Mauchly Computer Corporation (EMCC), and pioneered fundamental computer concepts, including the stored program, subroutines, and programming languages. Their work, as exposed in the widely read ''First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC'' (1945) and as taught in the Moore School Lectures (1946), influenced an explosion of computer development in the late 1940s all over the world. Biography John W. Mauchly was born on August 30, 1907, to Sebastian and Rachel (Scheidemantel) Mauchly in Cincinnati, Ohio. He moved with his parents and sister, Helen Elizabeth (Betty), at an early age to Chevy Chase, Maryland, when Sebastian Mauchly obtained ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
National Institute Of Standards And Technology
The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) is an agency of the United States Department of Commerce whose mission is to promote American innovation and industrial competitiveness. NIST's activities are organized into physical science laboratory programs that include nanoscale science and technology, engineering, information technology, neutron research, material measurement, and physical measurement. From 1901 to 1988, the agency was named the National Bureau of Standards. History Background The Articles of Confederation, ratified by the colonies in 1781, provided: The United States in Congress assembled shall also have the sole and exclusive right and power of regulating the alloy and value of coin struck by their own authority, or by that of the respective states—fixing the standards of weights and measures throughout the United States. Article 1, section 8, of the Constitution of the United States, ratified in 1789, granted these powers to the new Congr ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
United States
The United States of America (U.S.A. or USA), commonly known as the United States (U.S. or US) or America, is a country primarily located in North America. It consists of 50 states, a federal district, five major unincorporated territories, nine Minor Outlying Islands, and 326 Indian reservations. The United States is also in free association with three Pacific Island sovereign states: the Federated States of Micronesia, the Marshall Islands, and the Republic of Palau. It is the world's third-largest country by both land and total area. It shares land borders with Canada to its north and with Mexico to its south and has maritime borders with the Bahamas, Cuba, Russia, and other nations. With a population of over 333 million, it is the most populous country in the Americas and the third most populous in the world. The national capital of the United States is Washington, D.C. and its most populous city and principal financial center is New York City. Paleo-Americ ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
SWAC (computer)
The SWAC (Standards Western Automatic Computer) was an early electronic digital computer built in 1950 by the U.S. National Bureau of Standards (NBS) in Los Angeles, California. It was designed by Harry Huskey. Overview Like the SEAC which was built about the same time, the SWAC was a small-scale interim computer designed to be built quickly and put into operation while the NBS waited for more powerful computers to be completed (in particular, the RAYDAC by Raytheon). The machine used 2,300 vacuum tubes. It had 256 words of memory, using Williams tubes, with each word being 37 bits. It had only seven basic operations: add, subtract, and multiply (single precision and double precision versions); comparison, data extraction, input and output. Several years later, drum memory was added. When the SWAC was completed in August 1950, it was the fastest computer in the world. It continued to hold that status until the IAS computer was completed a year later. It could add two numb ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
University Of California, Los Angeles
The University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) is a public land-grant research university in Los Angeles, California. UCLA's academic roots were established in 1881 as a teachers college then known as the southern branch of the California State Normal School (now San José State University). This school was absorbed with the official founding of UCLA as the Southern Branch of the University of California in 1919, making it the second-oldest of the 10-campus University of California system (after UC Berkeley). UCLA offers 337 undergraduate and graduate degree programs in a wide range of disciplines, enrolling about 31,600 undergraduate and 14,300 graduate and professional students. UCLA received 174,914 undergraduate applications for Fall 2022, including transfers, making the school the most applied-to university in the United States. The university is organized into the College of Letters and Science and 12 professional schools. Six of the schools offer undergraduate degre ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Douglas Hartree
Douglas Rayner Hartree (27 March 1897 – 12 February 1958) was an English mathematician and physicist most famous for the development of numerical analysis and its application to the Hartree–Fock equations of atomic physics and the construction of a differential analyser using Meccano. Early life and education Douglas Hartree was born in Cambridge, England. His father, William, was a lecturer in engineering at the University of Cambridge and his mother, Eva Rayner, was president of the National Council of Women of Great Britain and first woman to be mayor of the city of Cambridge. One of his great-grandfathers was Samuel Smiles; another was the marine engineer William Hartree, partner of John Penn. Douglas Hartree was the oldest of three sons that survived infancy. A brother and sister died in infancy when he was still a child, but his two brothers would later also die. Hartree's 7-year-old brother John Edwin died when Hartree was 17, and Hartree's 22-year-old brot ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
