COMPUTER TRIVIA¢¢(Reprinted from APRIL 1992 POKEY,¢ With Thanks.)¢¢THE ANALYTICAL ENGINE (1835-1869)¢¢ Because of lack of government support, English mathematician Charles Babbage (1792-1871) never got to build his invention, whose design presaged the modern computer. Had it seen the light of day, the engine would have used data fed by punched cards, performed arithmetical calculations, and stored information in a memory bank.¢¢ Lady Lovelace, the mathemetically brilliant daughter of Lord Byron, developed some potential problems for the future machine, in effect acting as the first programmer.¢¢MARK 1 (1944)¢¢ Conceived by Howard H. Aiken of Harvard University in 1937, the first automatic digital computer was built by International Business Machines in 1944. An automatic sequence controlled calculator, it was first used for computing ballistic data. The computer could do three additions per second, working as fast as 20 people on calculators. The MARK 1 took up a lot of space; it was 51 ft. long and 8 ft. high, with 750,000 parts.¢¢ENIAC (1945-1946)¢¢ Built only a year or two after MARK 1, the first electronic computer was thousands of times faster; it could perform 5000 additions per second. It, too, was a monster, with 18,000 vacuum tubes, a weight of 30 tons, and a need for 15,000 sq. ft. of floor space. According to legend, when ENIAC was first switched on, lights all over Philadelphia dimmed.¢¢UNIVAC 1 (1951)¢¢ Delivered to the government in 1951 to help with the census, it cut human work hours from 200,000 to 28,000. On October 3, 1963 the computer was retired after 73,000 hours of operation and is now on display at the Smithsonian Institution.¢¢THE "PI" COMPUTER (1961)¢¢ One of the computers at the IBM Data Center calculated PI to 100,265 places in 8 hr. and 43 min. In one slightly long working day it performed 100 times (or more) the amount of work a man could do in 10 years.¢¢MOON-LANDING COMPUTER FAILURE (1969)¢¢ As "Eagle" approached its landing on the moon, the on-board computer, slated to guide the landing, set off an alarm indicating an overload. The astronauts took over, telemetering measurements to Mission Control in Houston. Later it was determined that interference from the radar system had scrambled the computer's circuits. (Editor's note: Actually, both navigational computer and the computer to process radar were left on, overloading the main computer with data during the landing! Source: "Men From Earth" by Buzz Aldrin.)¢¢THE STORY-WRITING COMPUTER (1973)¢¢ Programmed by Sheldon Klein, the computer writes detective stories 2,100 words long. Humans can still do much better, but...¢¢THE COMPUTER THAT HELPED STEAL¢$10.2 MILLION (1978)¢¢ In one of the biggest bank thefts in history, computer analyst Mark Rifkin used the services of a computer to transfer $10.2 million from the Security Pacific Bank in Los Angeles to an account in Switzerland. Unable to keep the amazing feat to himself, Rifkin made several remarks to a businessman, who called the FBI. He (Rifkin) was arrested on Nov. 5, 1978. While out on bail, Rifkin attempted a 2nd illegal wire-transfer of $50 million and was re-arrested. In March, 1979, he was convicted and sentenced to eight years in prison. The computer was not prosecuted.¢
