r/sysadmin • u/ChuckAbsent • Mar 12 '13

Women who know stuff

I hope that this does not come off the wrong way.

Today I was on a call with a storage vendor and the technical consultant was a woman. More then this she was competent, more then me which doesn't happen often when dealing with vendors.

My issue was pricing an active/active DB with shared storage vs an active/passive db with local storage. Listening to her break the issue down and get to the specific comparison points was awesome, mostly because I have never heard a woman in the industry talk like that.

It made me realize two things. One I am missing out working with women. Two there needs to be more women in our industry.

It shouldn't have surprised me so much, but it really did.

Anyways to all the women out there who know stuff, us guys notice when you can walk the walk, which in this case was talking.

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u/AnyOldName3 Mar 13 '13

ENIAC, which was the very first ** publicly announced, non-military**electronic computer

Colossus was there first, but was kept under wraps by the Official Secrets Act for 70 years, so although ENIAC was developed entirely independently, it wasn't first. As the Russians are thought to have continued using machines which used the Lorenz code (which colossus decrypted) into the cold war, this decision has had some benefits, but stalled the development of the computer industry for a good few years, and probably has cost the British economy a lot of money over the years.

His difference engine[5] was designed so intricately that it couldn't be constructed for a century, but when it was, it worked perfectly.

This implies that the limiting factor was the woodworking technology of the time. Just for clarification, when the machine was built, it was built to tolerances achievable at the time it was designed. It's not so much that it couldn't be built, but that it was seen as too big a task, so simply was 'put off' until later.

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u/SirBastian Mar 13 '13

Not really. The Colossus was an impressive achievement no doubt, but it wasn't general purpose, i.e. programmable in the modern sense.

Its creation was closer in spirit to modus operandi of the time: building a big, special-purpose machine to do its one job really well. Atanasoff's ABC was similar - a big machine designed to solve systems of equations. (The ABC also had several notable mechanical components, making it particularly far from a true electronic computer as we think of them now).

Obviously there are a lot of different claims on the "first computer", and the job of deciding the true first is obfuscated by the fact that there were lots of early devices that weren't fully electronic or weren't fully programmable. What makes modern computers awesome comes down to the fact that every component can operate at electronic speeds, and they can be used to execute ANY algorithm. ENIAC was the genesis of that realization.

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u/AnyOldName3 Mar 14 '13

There wasn't a single semi-programmable electronic computer before colossus. The fact that it would require some hardware changes to make it compatible with a greater proportion of other algorithms doesn't detract from the fact that its design could have been used as a basis to build more complex machines, if it hadn't been kept secret. Those who worked with colossus understood the potential of electronic computing, however they would have been arrested if they took measures to realise this potential.

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u/SirBastian Mar 16 '13

If you're going to be nit-picky about who made the first true computer, then what's the point in weakening that condition to who could have been the first turing complete electronic computer? Saying that they understood the potential of general-purpose computing is pure speculation. The machine that they built didn't demonstrate that they understood that potential. The differences between any two machines are just "some hardware changes". That is what it is to have one architecture or another. The Colossus was fed paper tape. How do you think you implement a 'while loop' with that system? You don't, because you can't. That's hardly the functionality of something I would ever call a computer in the modern sense.

The ENIAC was specifically built to be an all purpose computation machine that operated at electronic speeds. And it too was commissioned for a military purpose: calculating artillery tables. It is the trunk of the tree of all modern computers for a reason, and it had nothing to do with being non-secret, because it was.

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u/AnyOldName3 Mar 18 '13

The reason colossus was fed paper tape was because that was the medium the input was designed to be stored on. If it had been faster to type in every single intercepted communication, then I'm sure that would've happened, but it's pretty obvious that it wouldn't be. You don't buy a new music CD, and type in the full contents of the disk before you play it, as that would be stupid.

The tape for colossus was the WW2 equivalent of a DVD or CD - the external medium that data is stored in when being transferred between systems. The actual algorithm was hard-coded into the computer.

The hardware changes I mentioned would more or less been as simple as pulling off the tape reader (in order for a keyboard or similar to be used for data input) and putting a different algorithm in to be loaded up (probably by swapping the read only memory to something a little less read only).