On Sunday 01 January 2017 14:54:09 Joel Rees wrote: > On Sat, Dec 31, 2016 at 11:11 AM, Miles Fidelman > > <mfidel...@meetinghouse.net> wrote:
> > On 12/30/16 7:07 PM, deloptes wrote: No, I wrote that. > >>> In what way is the Antikythera mechanism not a computer? And where did > >>> your 400 years come from? > > Without a functioning Antikythera mechanism, we really can't answer > that question in a useful manner. However, I could guess that I could > not program that machine with anything that looks like a full C > compiler. So something that can't be programmed with anything that looks like a full C compiler is not a computer??? So Colossus was not a computer?? :-) C itself, of course, is MUCH later than Colossus, <quote> C was originally developed by Dennis Ritchie between 1969 and 1973 at Bell Labs, </quote> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C_(programming_language) <quote> Colossus was a set of computers developed by British codebreakers in 1943-1945 .... The prototype, Colossus Mark 1, was shown to be working in December 1943 </quote> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colossus_computer but I don't think that Colossus could compile with anything. It had to be directly programmed. Lisi > (Guess. For all we know, there were nanotech mechanical CPUs in the > thing before the seawater made it non-functional.) > > Subset C, maybe. The difference is important. > > >> I understand what you mean, but it was in the last 400y that this > >> machine took shape. In fact it was Turing that defined it. But he would > >> not be able > >> to define it if it was not the mathematicians before him. I agree with > >> you as well, we could go to the roots of mathematics, however even if > >> the definition of such a machine was so old, it wouldn't be possible to > >> build it without the technical advantage, so ... I still think my > >> statement is true. You can argue as long as you will. > > > > Well, you kind of forget: > > Joseph Jacquard (and maybe Basile Bouchon) > > not to mention Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelance > > Alonzo Church. > > And of course, John von Neumann (if you want to talk actual hardware > > architecture) > > Interesting thing about the siggie and the above. > > > -- > > In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. > > In practice, there is. .... Yogi Berra > > Intel really still wants us to believe that the 8086, because it was > Turing complete -- other than the memory limitation (cough) -- was > equivalent to the 68000. Nobody in their right mind used an 8086 to > control an engine, however. (But we do now use subsets of the Power PC > architecture and variations of the SH architecture.) > > You can program PLAs in something that looks like a subset of C, but > it's not the same. > > You can construct a CPU with a PLA, but you can get much more energy > efficiency and much better CPU speed by laying out the various CPU > parts as dedicated blocks of logic. > > On the converse, simulating a switch grid with a CPU introduces > serious inefficiencies, as well. > > Different classes of complexity. Programming, but not the same kind of > programs. > > The info system is another example. Very powerful, but I didn't want > to have to learn the info system just to wade through the info info > pages. It was very intuitive for someone who already had certain > keyboard habits, but not for the rest of us. Keyboard macros are not > the same thing as Forth or LISP primitives or M4 or cpp macrose. > > html is a bit less obtuse than info, less concise, and a shallower > learning curve. > > And plain text coupled with the apropos command (man -k), with the > in-page search function, still get me a lot farther into something > new, quicker, than info files. Much less keyboard dancing. > > My personal vote for the original topic is man 7, as someone else > mentioned. (Yes, the man pages did, from back in the system 6 days, > even, include a _little_ bit of tutorial.)
