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Nimrod (computer)
The Nimrod, built in the United Kingdom by Ferranti for the 1951 Festival of Britain, was an early computer custom-built to play Nim, inspired by the earlier Nimatron. The twelve-by-nine-by-five-foot (3.7-by-2.7-by-1.5-meter) computer, designed by John Makepeace Bennett and built by engineer Raymond Stuart-Williams, allowed exhibition attendees to play a game of Nim against an artificial intelligence. The player pressed buttons on a raised panel corresponding with lights on the machine to select their moves, and the Nimrod moved afterward, with its calculations represented by more lights. The speed of the Nimrod's calculations could be reduced to allow the presenter to demonstrate exactly what the computer was doing, with more lights showing the state of the calculations. The Nimrod was intended to demonstrate Ferranti's computer design and programming skills rather than to entertain, though Festival attendees were more interested in playing the game than the logic behind it. ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Computerspielemuseum Berlin
The Computerspielemuseum () is a video game museum founded in 1997. From 1997 to 2000, it had a permanent exhibition in Berlin. Afterwards, it became an online only museum. In 2011 the museum reopened its permanent exhibition in Berlin's neighborhood of Friedrichshain, on Karl-Marx-Allee. During the first month of its permanent exhibition, it had 12,000 visitors. General The Computerspielemuseum opened the first permanent exhibition in the world for digital interactive entertainment culture in 1997 in Berlin. After that, it became responsible for 30 national and international exhibitions. Among these was the project "pong.mythos" sponsored by the German Federal Cultural Foundation, Germany's most successful traveling exhibition in the history of computer games. In the last five years, over 470,000 visitors have seen this exhibition. The museum contains around 25,000 data storage devices with games, around 12,000 technical magazines, many historical arcade games, home computers ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
1939 New York World's Fair
The 1939–40 New York World's Fair was a world's fair held at Flushing Meadows–Corona Park in Queens, New York, United States. It was the second-most expensive American world's fair of all time, exceeded only by St. Louis's Louisiana Purchase Exposition of 1904. Many countries around the world participated in it, and over 44 million people attended its exhibits in two seasons. It was the first exposition to be based on the future, with an opening slogan of "Dawn of a New Day", and it allowed all visitors to take a look at "the world of tomorrow". When World War II began four months into the 1939 World's Fair, many exhibits were affected, especially those on display in the pavilions of countries under Axis occupation. After the close of the fair in 1940, many exhibits were demolished or removed, though some buildings were retained for the 1964–1965 New York World's Fair, held at the same site. Planning In 1935, at the height of the Great Depression, a group of Ne ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
OXO (video Game)
''OXO'' is a video game developed by A S Douglas in 1952 which simulates a game of noughts and crosses (tic-tac-toe). It was one of the first games developed in the early history of video games. Douglas programmed the game as part of a thesis on human-computer interaction at the University of Cambridge. It was written on the Electronic Delay Storage Automatic Calculator (EDSAC). EDSAC was one of the first stored-program computers, with memory that could be read from or written to, and had three small cathode ray tube screens to display the state of the memory; Douglas re-purposed one screen to demonstrate portraying other information to the user, such as the state of a noughts and crosses game. After the game served its purpose, it was discarded on the original hardware but later successfully reconstructed. ''OXO'', along with a draughts game by Christopher Strachey completed around the same time, is one of the earliest known games to display visuals on an electronic sc ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Marienbad (video Game)
''Marienbad'' was a 1962 Polish puzzle mainframe game created by Elwro engineer Witold Podgórski in Wrocław, Poland for its Odra 1003. It was an adaption of the logic game nim. Inspired by the discussion in the magazine ''Przekrój'' of a variant of nim in the 1961 film ''Last Year at Marienbad'' (''L'Année dernière à Marienbad''), named "Marienbad" by the magazine, Podgórski programmed the game for the in-development 1003 mainframe, released in 1963. The game had players opposing the computer in alternating rounds of removing matches from a set, with the last player to take a match the loser. As the computer always played the optimal moves, it was essentially unbeatable. ''Marienbad'' did not spread far beyond its initial location. Elwro did not produce or advertise the game, though Podgórski recreated it at the Wojskowa Akademia Techniczna (Military University of Technology in Warsaw). The game fell into obscurity, with no pictures or documentation surviving to recrea ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Odra (computer)
Odra was a line of computers manufactured in Wrocław, Poland. The name comes from the Odra river that flows through the city of Wrocław. Overview The production started in 1959–1960. Models 1001, 1002, 1003, 1013, 1103, 1204 were of original Polish construction. Models 1304 and 1305 were functional counterparts of ICL 1905 and 1906 due to software agreement. The last model was 1325 based on two models by ICL. The computers were built at the Elwro manufacturing plant, which was closed in 1989. Odra 1002 was capable of only 100–400 operations per second. In 1962, Witold Podgórski, an employee of Elwro, managed to create a computer game on a prototype of Odra 1003; it was an adaptation of a variant of Nim, as depicted in the film ''Last Year at Marienbad''. The computer could play a perfect game and was guaranteed to win. The game was never distributed outside of the Elwro company, but its versions appeared elsewhere. It was probably the first Polish computer game in hist ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
SILLIAC
The SILLIAC (''Sydney version of the Illinois Automatic Computer'', i.e. the ''Sydney ILLIAC''), an early computer built by the University of Sydney, Australia, was based on the ILLIAC and ORDVAC computers developed at the University of Illinois. Like other early computers, SILLIAC was physically large. The computer itself was a single large cabinet 2.5 m high, 3 m wide and 0.6 m deep in one room. Its power supply occupied a second room and air conditioning required an additional room in the basement. It ran until May 17, 1968 when it was replaced by a faster and bigger machine. Although it was then broken up, some pieces of SILLIAC are at the Powerhouse Museum and others are displayed at Sydney University. History SILLIAC had its genesis in late 1953 when Harry Messel, the dynamic new head of the School of Physics, and John Blatt, newly arrived researcher, both independently realised that the School needed an electronic computer as a tool for theoretical p ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
SMIL (computer)
SMIL ( sv, Siffermaskinen i Lund, "The Number Machine in Lund") was a first-generation computer built at Lund University in Lund, Sweden. SMIL was based on the IAS architecture developed by John von Neumann. Carl-Erik Fröberg belonged to the group of five young Swedish scientists 1947–48 that IVA sent to the U.S. to gather information about the early computer development, and then came to strongly influence the development in Sweden. Fröberg visited with Erik Stemme the Institute for Advanced Study, and John von Neumann's research group. Back in Lund, he played a leading role in the creation of SMIL, which was the first computer developed in Lund and among the first in Sweden. SMIL was introduced in 1956 and then was in operation until 1970. In February 1962 SMIL was fitted with a compiler for ALGOL 60. The compiler was constructed by Torgil Ekman and Leif Robertson. Carl-Erik Fröberg was also behind the early emergence of numerical analysis as a separate university ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Ludwig Erhard
Ludwig Wilhelm Erhard (; 4 February 1897 – 5 May 1977) was a German politician affiliated with the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), and chancellor of West Germany from 1963 until 1966. He is known for leading the West German postwar economic reforms and economic recovery ('' Wirtschaftswunder'', German for "economic miracle") in his role as Minister of Economic Affairs under Chancellor Konrad Adenauer from 1949 to 1963. During that period he promoted the concept of the social market economy (''soziale Marktwirtschaft''), on which Germany's economic policy in the 21st century continues to be based. In his tenure as Chancellor, however, Erhard lacked support from Adenauer, who remained chairman of the party until 1966, and failed to win the public's confidence in his handling of a budget deficit and his direction of foreign policy. His popularity waned, and he resigned his chancellorship on 30 November 1966. Early life Ludwig Erhard was born in Fürth, Kingdom of Bavaria on ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
West Germany
West Germany is the colloquial term used to indicate the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG; german: Bundesrepublik Deutschland , BRD) between its formation on 23 May 1949 and the German reunification through the accession of East Germany on 3 October 1990. During the Cold War, the western portion of Germany and the associated territory of West Berlin were parts of the Western Bloc. West Germany was formed as a political entity during the Allied occupation of Germany after World War II, established from eleven states of Germany, states formed in the three Allied zones of occupation held by the United States, the United Kingdom, and France. The FRG's provisional capital was the city of Bonn, and the Cold War era country is retrospectively designated as the Bonn Republic. At the onset of the Cold War, Europe was divided between the Western and Eastern Bloc, Eastern blocs. Germany was divided into the two countries. Initially, West Germany claimed an exclusive mandate for all of Ger ... [...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 M ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Sixpence (British Coin)
The British sixpence () piece, sometimes known as a tanner or sixpenny bit, was a denomination of sterling coinage worth of one pound or half of one shilling. It was first minted in 1551, during the reign of Edward VI, and circulated until 1980. The coin was made from silver from its introduction in 1551 until 1947, and thereafter in cupronickel. Before Decimal Day in 1971, sterling used the Carolingian monetary system (£sd), under which the largest unit was a pound (£), divisible into 20 shillings (s), each of 12 pence (d). Following decimalisation, it had a value of new pence (£0.025). In 2016, new decimal sixpences began being minted by the Royal Mint as commemorative issues to celebrate Christmas; these coins have been produced for each year since, and are minted in sterling silver. History The first sixpences were minted in 1551, during the reign of Edward VI. They came about as a result of the debasement of silver coinage in the 1540s, in particular the silve ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Shilling
The shilling is a historical coin, and the name of a unit of modern currencies formerly used in the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, other British Commonwealth countries and Ireland, where they were generally equivalent to 12 pence or one-twentieth of a pound before being phased out during the 20th century. Currently the shilling is used as a currency in five east African countries: Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, Somalia, as well as the ''de facto'' country of Somaliland. The East African Community additionally plans to introduce an East African shilling. History The word ''shilling'' comes from Old English "Scilling", a monetary term meaning twentieth of a pound, from the Proto-Germanic root skiljaną meaning 'to separate, split, divide', from (s)kelH- meaning 'to cut, split.' The word "Scilling" is mentioned in the earliest recorded Germanic law codes, those of Æthelberht of Kent. There is evidence that it may alternatively be an early borrowing of Phoenic ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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