Comments by "Gabor Rajnai" (@gaborrajnai6213) on "Veritasium" channel.

  1. Most people call the EDVAC as the first real computer, because that was the first, which was general purpose and could make any kind of calculations. Meanwhile Colossus could be used for a very specific set of calculations, which is not suprising, as it didnt have any memory at all. ENIAC was also a specialized computer built solely to make ballistic tables.
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  2. Colossus wasnt an electric computer, it was an electromechanical computer. Best of both words. But it didnt have any RAM whatsoever, so it was not a computer but an oversized calculator.
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  3. We measured the speed of light in school with a microwave owen, and a bowl of cheese. The frequency of the owen operating on was given in the manual, the rotating part was taken out. The cheese was burned at the wavelength of the microwaves, so we had everything to calculate the speed of microwaves v = f λ. It was quite precise measurement, as far as I remember. So clickbait I guess.
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  4. I hate to tell you, but Leibniz built the first digital calculator, the stepped reckoner. It was also binary. BTW digital doesnt mean, that it is electronic, it means that it represents a given number of states, be it electrons or ball bearings. The problem with computers was never about the actual calculation mechanism, but the internal memory to store the instructions the partial results and the results.
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  5. In the university I had a curiosity project with one of my professor, where we built a primitive binary calculator using gas pressure regulators. We built awesome logical gates out of those.
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  6. You run down the same calculation on the same computer. It is unlikely that if it is not a good answer, it would be similar in result.
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