We kicked off our home computing with an Acorn Atom.
I was in playing with the Manchester SSEM “Baby” again today and actually remembered to take a couple of pictures for a change!
A whole 1024 bits of valve binary goodness!
I fear you rather missed the intended joke there...
Incidentally that video title is wrong, Tennis for Two was not the first video game: that honour belongs to the UK - either a version of noughts-and-crosses called OXO that ran on the Cambridge EDSAC in 1952, or a contemporaneous, but now lost, game where the player guided two-pixel “sheep” through a moving gate.
Analogue computers were very well suited to ballistic simulations
I’m pretty certain the first ‘oxo’ game was programmed on the Ferranti Mk I (the descendant of the SSEM) in Manchester, not EDSAC. We certainly take it as a win here in Manchester!
Yes, the gunnery computers used on Anti aircraft guns towards the end of the war were analogue, in conjunction with the Radar information they could calculate the correct bearing to aim at for an aircraft on a turning path as well as the travel time of the shell.
You are right... I had watched an interesting presentation about this about a year ago, and they gave credit to Christopher Strachey at Manchester, but it wasn’t noughts and crosses, it was a draughts game. I don’t know why that fell out of my head again, and Wikipedia still assets A.S.Douglas’s “a game of noughts and crosses” on the EDSAC. The timing of these is very close, but while Strachey’s latest possible date is Summer 1952, Douglas’s is December 1952.I’m pretty certain the first ‘oxo’ game was programmed on the Ferranti Mk I (the descendant of the SSEM) in Manchester, not EDSAC. We certainly take it as a win here in Manchester!
Yes, the gunnery computers used on Anti aircraft guns towards the end of the war were analogue, in conjunction with the Radar information they could calculate the correct bearing to aim at for an aircraft on a turning path as well as the travel time of the shell.
Analogue computers were very well suited to ballistic simulations - one of the earliest computer games, Tennis for Two (Tennis for Two - The Original Video Game - YouTube) ran on an analogue computer that had been designed to calculate ICBM flightpaths. By the time solid-state took over from valves, analogue computing had given way to digital, and floating-point mathematics had got fast enough that digital computers could do the same calculations.
Incidentally that video title is wrong, Tennis for Two was not the first video game: that honour belongs to the UK - either a version of noughts-and-crosses called OXO that ran on the Cambridge EDSAC in 1952, or a contemporaneous, but now lost, game where the player guided two-pixel “sheep” through a moving gate.
as you can't move 16 inch guns fast enough to cope with the roll)
Similarly the turret movement, we had an ex navy engineer in our office who told us of the woes of his ship in which the turret motors were not up to the job and burn out for a past time!
The B29 had remote controlled guns and a fire control system, 5 sighting stations for 4 turrets, each sight had a computer and could control two or more turrets.Battleships had similar machines which also included things like gyroscopes to correct for the ship roll (I think they delayed the firing till the ship was flat rather than correcting for it, as you can't move 16 inch guns fast enough to cope with the roll). Here's all you need to know to operate your battleship:
I expect that if they`d looked in the tool kit there would have been a handle for manual operation. Or they could have just turmed the boat so the guns pointed in the right direction.
There`s usually a work round.
But I suspect that hand wind might not be viable. This is perhaps an extreme example but Wikipedia identifies that a three gun turret of the WWII Yamato each weighed around 2,500 tonnes. I'm not sure that I can get my head around that.
That`s about the weight of an entire Leander class frigate.