PART 1 • The first chess machine
sembling that which we know today. In the 1940's, properly aiming and
firing a long-range artillery piece required the use of complex mathematical tables. The tables were be consulted due to the many variables which
could affect the flight of a shell: distance, wind speed and direction, even
temperature and humidity could influence a shell's trajectory. These artillery tables (which were printed and distributed to gunners in book form)
had to be calculated manually, by hand; a full set of tables for a particular caliber gun could contain thousands of entries, each of which had to
be figured out by a person who made the calculations. In fact, if you look
up the word “computer” in a pre-World War II dictionary, you'll learn that
the word refers to a person who makes complex calculations.
Truth be known, it was actually easier to design and create a new artillery
piece than it was to calculate the firing tables for it. Thousands of people
(mostly women, as the men were off on the front lines) were employed as
human calculators, figuring out the proper numbers to plug into the firing
tables for a new field piece. There had to be an easier way...
The U.S. War Department went full-bore into research on electronic
calculating devices; electrically powered and running on vacuum tubes,
these machines, primitive though they might be by today's standards,
could greatly speed up the calculation of firing tables (as well as any
other fairly complex math which might be required). Although the first
electronic computer wasn't completed until it was too late for the machine
to have any active role in the war, it was indeed the world war which
prompted the development of the first electronic computer.
These early computers were room-sized and could run for only a few
minutes at a time; vacuum tubes heated up easily and, with thousands of
them working in a confined area, it was a common occurrence to blow out
a tube due to the high temperatures they generated. How powerful were
these computers? A hand-held calculator of the 1970's (considered quite
primitive today) could calculate faster than the old “big box” computers.
But these mammoth machines sowed the seeds of the coming digital
revolution.
We should take a short look at what “digital” means while we're here. It's
not strictly necessary that you know this stuff, but it's fairly interesting and
good to know regardless.
Computers don't do a danged thing, really, except manipulate two
numbers: 1's and 0's. They wouldn't know what a “2” was if one walked up
and smacked it in the memory bank. But any number can be expressed
in nothing but zeros and ones, using a number system called “binary”.
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