The Curious History of Digital Computers Quiz

Answer: ENIAC

ENIAC was developed and built by the U.S. Army for the purpose of calculating ballistic firing tables by emulating electronically a hand-operated mechanical calculator.

It used a 10-digit decimal system rather than the binary system used by modern computers. It could not store programs, and conditional branching, a basic function of all modern computers, involved clumsy manual programming using wires and plugs.

An amusing but false rumour at the time was that the lights in Philadelphia would dim whenever the behemoth was turned on. Only one ENIAC was ever built, and in 1955 it was put out of action by a lightning strike.

Answer: Atanasoff-Berry

The validity of the claim that the Atanasoff-Berry Computer was the first electronic computer has been debated by many, for various technical reasons. There is no doubt however, that many of the designer Atanasoff's ideas were seminal in future computer design.

A case was brought by the holders of the ENIAC patent, Sperry Rand, against Honeywell, charging them with patent infringement and demanding royalties. At the same time Honeywell sued Sperry Rand for monopoly and fraud, and seeking the invalidation of the patent, on the basis that they had used Atanasoff's designs for the ABC in the building of ENIAC.

The decision came down in favour of Honeywell, invalidating the patent and putting the design concepts into the public domain. The decision enabled open competition between manufacturers, and the explosion of the modern commercial computer age.

Answer: The Colossus

Not everyone considers the Colossus as a true computer, in part because it was designed specifically for breaking the Lorenz machine ciphers. However, by 1945 the programming methodology had been made more flexible, allowing for computation of solutions to other problems.

Because of its ongoing use in code-breaking, the Colossus remained secret until the mid-1970s. When the creators of ENIAC learned of the Colossus in June 1976, they were reportedly astonished to discover they were not the first to build a programmable electronic digital computer.

Alan Turing also designed the Bombe, an electromechanical device that used "automated deduction" to decipher messages encrypted by the German Enigma machine. It was a brilliantly designed machine that made an extraordinary contribution to the British war effort, but it was not a programmable electronic digital computer.

Answer: Konrad Zuse

Konrad Zuse was well ahead of the game. He built Z1, the world's first program-controlled computer, in 1938. It had all the basic components of modern machines, and it used the binary system. In 1941 he built Z3, the world's first fully functional programmable computer.

In 1945 Zuse created "Plankalkuel" the world's first high-level programming language, which he used to design the the world's first chess program.

In 1946 he founded the world's first computer startup company, the Zuse-Ingenieurbüro Hopferau. Venture capital was raised in part through an IBM option on Zuse's patents - and the rest is history.

Answer: Ada Lovelace

Ada Lovelace did not create an algorithm, but in fact translated one written by the Italian mathematician Luigi Menabrea, to compute Bernoulli numbers using the Analytical Engine, the successor to Babbage's Difference Engine. She does however deserve high praise for the explanatory notes she added to the translation, that ran to three times the length of the original.

Her annotated translation was called "the most important paper in the history of digital computing before modern times" (Bromley, "Introduction" in Babbage, Henry Prevost, Babbage's Calculating Engines, xv)

The computer language Ada, in wide use by the US military and others, is named after Ada Lovelace.

Answer: Bug

Contrary to popular myth, Grace Hopper did not coin the term "bug", which had been in use for many years, but she did help to popularise its use.
While she was working for the US Navy in 1947, a moth was found stuck in a computer relay causing it to malfunction. The fix, to remove the offending creature, was known as "debugging".

Likewise, Grace Hopper did not invent the programming language COBOL, but she certainly helped, while working as a technical consultant to the "Conference on Data Systems Languages" which developed COBOL in 1959. COBOL was partly based on her earlier work on programming languages and a compiler. For this reason she is often called "the grandmother of COBOL".

She was sometimes referred to as "Amazing Grace". The U.S. Navy Arleigh Burke-class guided-missile destroyer USS Hopper was named for her, as was the Cray XE6 "Hopper" supercomputer at NERSC.

Answer: Frequency Hopping

"Frequency-hopping spread spectrum transmission" repeatedly switches frequencies to minimise interference and to avoid interception or jamming of radio signals.

The concept was first mentioned in 1908 by Johannes Zenneck, but Lamarr and Antheil must take credit for bringing the idea to reality. The U.S. Navy initially ignored the technology, but used it later in the mid-1950s, during the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Frequency-hopping was incorporated into the WiFi standard established in 1997 that has become ubiquitous in modern computing devices.

Answer: Wood

Englebart wasn't the only person or the first to invent the mouse, which was invented independently by Tom Cranston and Fred Longstaff in 1952, and Ralph Benjamin in the 1960s. They used rubberised trackballs rather than wheels, but because their devices were part of classified military projects they were never developed any further.

Englebart also invented or conceptualised numerous computing ideas that are commonplace today, including online networking, interactive systems, video conferencing, and improved methods of hypertext.

Answer: Unplugged Norway from the Internet

In 1988 "Morris" was released, a self-replicating worm that infected systems connected to the Internet. It was designed to gauge the extent of the Internet, and not intended to be malicious. Unfortunately an unforeseen design error meant the worm replicated itself excessively, bringing infected computers to a halt.

Professor Emeritus Pål Spilling's American co-workers warned him of the Morris worm, and to prevent infection of Norway's computers he disconnected Norway from the Internet, which was very new at the time, by unplugging a single cable.

Answer: Interface Manager

Bill Gates wanted to use the name Interface Manager for the product release, but was advised by his marketing division to change it to Windows. Apple had released the Macintosh the previous year, and by comparison Windows 1.0 was uninspiring to say the least.

Things changed enormously over the years, and by the 1990s Windows had become the most used desktop operating system. By 2017, Windows had achieved around 90% desktop market share, with the Mac OS down to just over 3%.

Now things are changing again, with mobile and tablet devices steadily taking over from desktops. In early 2017 Apple (iOS) and Google (Android) are competing for mobile computing market dominance with well over 95% market share between them.