Historical points about Computing in UK
The following Email from Randell to Farber, does explain to me why Brooker was so "closed source" (*) while teaching at Essex, in fact this was one of the reasons that I moved next door to Maths, the other was the
negative comments of Bornat on my ALGOL-60 assigment (he was definately wrong). All Colossus machines were destroyed.


(*) he went crazy about his lecture being taped by a fellow student from Iran.

From: Brian Randell <Brian.Randell@ncl.ac.uk>
Date: November 19, 2007 8:51:22 AM EST
To: Charles Pinneo <pinneo@sbcglobal.net>
Cc: dave@farber.net
Subject: Re: [IP] Re: 60-year-old computer loses race

Charlie:

> What's interesting to me about Colossus is how the English see the
> history of computers in a different light than Americans see it due
> to national chauvinistic rationalizations and also as affected by
> how you define "computer." For example, Americans who don't know
> much about computer history, might see Univac as the first computer,
> whereas the British might see Colossus as the first computer. Or the
> French might place more importance on Jacquard's Punched Cards. It's
> all how you look at it from a nationalistic point of view.

Aside from nationalism, the way I put it is that if you add enough
adjectives, anything can be identified as "first". (And issues of
primacy are not really as important as issues of influence.)

FWIW, to my mind the first operational practical electronic stored
program computer was the Cambridge EDSAC - 1949

If you remove "practical" you identify the Manchester machine built to
test the Williams tube memory, which worked first in 1948.

Then remove "stored program" and you get into arguments about degree
of programmability, and in particular between ENIAC (1946) and
Colossus (1943/4)

Then remove electronic and you get back to Zuse

Then also remove operational and you get to Babbage - my other great
hero.

:-)

The situation with regard to the Colossus is complicated by issues of
secrecy. I broke the first reasonably detailed news of the Colossus in
the 1970s, after nearly 30 years of everyone assuming that the ENIAC
was the first electronic computer. But now in Britain at least its
fame is bound up with that of Bletchley Park, Alan Turing and
(confusingly) Enigma.

The recent publicity has been engineered as part of a campaign to
obtain funding for a museum at Bletchley Park.

> In view of history, though, Colossus is far more important because
> if Colossus hadn't been used at Bletchley Park to defeat the
> Germans, we would all be speaking German.

Agreed, though that's a bit of an overstatement - I think military
historians now accept that the work at Bletchley Park shortened the
war by a couple of years - which of course is a fantastic achievement,
and to have kept it all completely under wraps for 30 years is amazing.

> Has the rebuilding of Colossus sparked more interest in the history
> of computing in England?

Certainly there's been quite a bit of publicity, but perhaps the
general interest is more related to code-breaking than to computing.

> I found this really neat YouTube movie clip about the rebuilding of
> Colossus. I'm sure you've seen it.

I hadn't - thanks for the heads-up.

> I read The Second World War by Winston Churchill. I mailed it to my
> brother in Arizona and then he mailed it to my nephew (his son) in
> Florida. It's making the rounds in our family.

I don't get to spend much time on matters to do with computer history
these days, but I count my publicising of Tommy Flowers' work on
Colossus, and getting this University to award him an honorary
doctorate as perhaps my proudest achievement, and my getting to see
the cache of Babbage papers, including his fantastic unpublished 1837
manuscript "On the Mathematical Powers of the Calculating Engine", at
the Oxford Museum of the History of Science, as one of my most
exciting moments.

cheers

Brian

--
School of Computing Science, Newcastle University, Newcastle upon Tyne,
NE1 7RU, UK
EMAIL = Brian.Randell@ncl.ac.uk PHONE = +44 191 222 7923
FAX = +44 191 222 8232 URL = http://www.cs.ncl.ac.uk/~brian.randell/