Comments by "GH1618" (@GH-oi2jf) on "Stanford" channel.

  1. Jack Copeland — Interesting, except for your last statement. The bombe wasn’t searching at anywhere near the speed of light, because it was limited by its mechanical aspect.
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  2. prac2 — She is “rated” only as the first programmer, which she was.
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  3. This talk is about Turing.
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  4. The British codebreaking work is interesting because of the contribution it made toward winning the war. That isn’t the case with German codebreaking, or any other technology.
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  5. First electronic computer. It wasn’t quite finished, though, when WW2 interrupted development. Iowa State was so clueless about its importance that they scrapped it.
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  6.  @troyfrei2962  — I’m aware of the significance of the ABC establishing prior art which broke the ENIAC patents. Nevertheless, the ABC wasn’t quite completed and wasn’t a general-purpose machine to begin with. It is what it is — or was. What I find most interesting about the ABC is that its memory used stored charge, a pronciple used in dynamic RAM today.
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  7. Tesla was a clever fellow and an important engineer, but he has something of a cult status. Mikhail Dolivo-Dobrovolsky was even more important to the development of modern power systems than Tesla, but hardly anybody has heard of him. We are always hearing about Tesla and even naming things after him, but how about Steinmetz? How often do we read a reference to Oliver B. Shallenberger? Many people contributed to the development of electric power besides Tesla.
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