Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Posting-Version: version B 2.10.2 9/18/84; site lsuc.UUCP Path: utzoo!lsuc!msb From: msb@lsuc.UUCP (Mark Brader) Newsgroups: net.misc Subject: Only 3 computers will be needed... Message-ID: <703@lsuc.UUCP> Date: Wed, 10-Jul-85 18:23:15 EDT Article-I.D.: lsuc.703 Posted: Wed Jul 10 18:23:15 1985 Date-Received: Wed, 10-Jul-85 19:00:51 EDT Reply-To: msb@lsuc.UUCP (Mark Brader) Organization: Law Society of Upper Canada, Toronto Lines: 61 Summary: Response to a query of some time ago Some time ago, somebody asked who it was that said to whom that in their opinion only X computers would ever be needed and no more need be built. I never saw any reasonably authoritative followups, but I was away for most of May, and I think the item was posted before that. So please excuse me if this is a duplicate, or not in the same group as the original query. Anyway, my source is an article by Lord Bowden (note for Americans: "Lord" is a title, not a name). He's now (or was recently) with the University of Manchester, and was formerly a British cabinet minister in their Dept. of Education and Science. The article is called "The Language of Computers", and can be found in American Scientist vol 58 (1970) pp 43-53, or in the anthology Mathematics: People, Problems, Results, ed. by Douglas M. Campbell and John C. Higgins, pub. by Wadsworth International (1984), vol 3 pp 2-14. Lord Bowden writes: # I joined Ferranti in 1950. They had nearly finished building the # first digital computer ever to be made by a commercial firm in England # and they asked me to see if it would be possible to manufacture such # machines and sell them at a profit. Our machine could do simple # arithmetic a thousand times as fast as a man with an adding machine, # but it was not at all obvious that anyone would be prepared to pay a # hundred thousand pounds or so for it. It wasn't as reliable as we # could have liked it to be; it absorbed information slowly by reading # teleprinter ticker tape, and it could only print out its answers digit # by digit. ... # I must remind you that this was in the days before IBM. I went to # see Professor Douglas Hartree, who had built the first differential # analyzers in England and had more experience in using these very # specialized computers than anyone else. He told me that, in his # opinion, all the calculations that would ever be needed in this country # could be done on the three digital computers which were then being # built -- one in Cambridge, one in Teddington, and one in Manchester. # No one else, he said, would ever need machines of the own, or would # be able to afford to buy them. He added that the machines were # exceedingly difficult to use, and could not be trusted to anyone who # was not a professional mathematician, and he advised Ferranti to get # out of the business and abandon the idea of selling any more of them. # It is amazing how completely wrong a great man can be. ... Hartree # used to tell this story against himself as long as he lived, but I # want to emphasize that in 1951 it was much harder to see into the # crystal ball than you might think. Ferranti needed a new product, and # they were more hopeful than Professor Hartree ... There's more good stuff in the article too. Since Toronto is mentioned I'll include one more quotation: # I believe that I was the first person who ever sold an electronic # digital computer on the commercial market. It went to Toronto in 1951, # and the first job it tackled was to study the flow of the St. Lawrence # River thought the fragmented channels of the Thousand Islands. These # calculations had to be done before the seaway could be built. ... Our # machine did the work in three months. The Canadians told us that the # machine had paid for itself several times over by doing this one # calculation so quickly. Posted by Mark Brader, Toronto.