HHC 2024: Forgotten Father of the Computer (Jeff Birt)

[@kmonyt]

This guy is everywhere! Saw him a week later at Tandy Assembly 350 miles away from this one! Nice job!

[@maxmn5821]

I’d like to know a bit more about the decimal to binary conversion at the input. It is probably not trivial since ten is not a power of two. Did ABC perform sort of long division by two?

[@HeyBirt]

The last slide has three good books on the subject. I suspect you might be able to find PDFs if you search for them.

[@geoffquickfall]

Very interesting talk, many thanks Jeff (you spelt your name wrong!) cheers, Geoff

[@maxmn5821]

Z1 used floating point, too. (I‘d probably call it mechanical - not electromechanical, since all that electricity did was shaft rotation by a vacuum cleaner motor). Thanks for bringing up the ABC - I was completely unaware

[@NickKeighley]

I thought this was a rhetorical question?

[@heliocrono]

The first electronic computer was designed by Torres Quevedo, spanish inventor, and the name was algebraic machine.

[@HeyBirt]

His machines were analog and mechanical. Twenty years prior multiple mechanical analog tide calculators were designed and made. Of course, off of these inventions were preceede3d by 2000 years by the Antikythera mechanism the earliest known mechanical analog computing device.

[@MrNoahTall]

@@HeyBirt Thanks for sending me down a rabbit hole with my Sunday morning coffee and my laptop. (Anthikythera) I was also able to find Atanasoff: Forgotten Father of the Computer for $2, so that's on its way to my bookshelf.

[@MrWaalkman]

Hey Birt!