neatorama.com — The history of computing spans thousands of years - from the primitive notched bones found in Africa, to the invention of abacus in 2400 BC, to Charles Babbage’s Difference Engine in 1883, to the rise of the popularity of Personal Computers (PCs) in the 1970s.
Jan 25, 2008 View in Crawl 4
wibambauJan 26, 2008
Something interesting about the reliability regarding the ENIAC's vacuum tubes: (source: wikipedia)Some electronics experts predicted that tube failures would occur so frequently that the machine would never be useful. This prediction turned out to be partially correct: several tubes burned out almost every day, leaving it nonfunctional about half the time. Special high-reliability tubes were not available until 1948. Most of these failures, however, occurred during the warm-up and cool-down periods, when the tube heaters and cathodes were under the most thermal stress. By the simple (if expensive) expedient of never turning the machine off, the engineers reduced ENIAC's tube failures to the more acceptable rate of one tube every two days. According to a 1989 interview with Eckert the continuously failing tubes story was therefore mostly a myth: "We had a tube fail about every two days and we could locate the problem within 15 minutes."In 1954, the longest continuous period of operation without a failure was 116 hours (close to five days).... just amazing what level of reliability we now take for granted.
philbertJan 26, 2008
I don't know about that, I built this computer 6 months ago and it still feels top of the line to me. And I actually use all of it's processing power. Not like people who get a high end machine for using Word and IE.
Closed AccountJan 26, 2008
I've got a bad feeling about this.
androothebearJan 26, 2008
because all old people know one another.
slockhartJan 27, 2008
How far we have fallen. :(
barristaJan 28, 2008
Articles like this are good reading but the facts should be checked really. Sentences like" just prior to the outbreak of world war II in 1943" or some thing to that effect - make me fairly sure that this was written by someone from USA. World war II didn't start with the bombing of Pearl Harbour guys it was already going for years! - therefore factually this article is questionable..... anyway..... interesting