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Energy then -- Energy now (Original Post) SHRED Oct 2016 OP
K&R! 2naSalit Oct 2016 #1
That's the MAVAC at North Carolina State University... hunter Oct 2016 #2
I'm speculating that the "MAVAC" is a version of the EDVAC. hunter Oct 2016 #3

hunter

(38,313 posts)
2. That's the MAVAC at North Carolina State University...
Fri Oct 21, 2016, 01:39 PM
Oct 2016

... but curiously, I cannot find the specifications or an emulator, not even any nostalgic reminiscences about working with the machine. Other vacuum tube machines of that era are well documented.

https://d.lib.ncsu.edu/collections/catalog/0016860

It makes me wonder what they were doing with the machine and who was funding it. Nuclear secrets and missile guidance are always a good bet for the 'sixties.

So far as energy goes, we might have abandoned fossil fuels for a technology as sophisticated as cell phones a long time ago...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small_modular_reactor









hunter

(38,313 posts)
3. I'm speculating that the "MAVAC" is a version of the EDVAC.
Fri Oct 21, 2016, 04:12 PM
Oct 2016
Mechanical and Aerospace Variable Automatic Computer perhaps?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EDVAC

There's a huge amount of bad blood and cold war cloak-and-dagger baggage that came along with these machines.

EDVAC developers, John W. Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert, had major grudges against everyone, including John von Neumann, who this machine's basic architecture (used in many machines today) is named after.

It's a fascinating story, here's a Mauchly account...

Johnny (von Neumann) learned instantly, of course, as was his nature. But he chose to refer to the modules we had described as “organs” and to substitute hypothetical “neurons” for hypothetical vacuum tubes or other devices which could perform logical functions. It was clear that Johnny was rephrasing our logic, but it was still the SAME logic. Also, he was introducing different but equivalent symbols; nevertheless the devices still did the same things. Johnny did NOT alter the fundamental concepts which we had already formulated for the EDVAC.

Everyone could see how fascinated Johnny was with a subject which had somehow escaped his amazingly wide interests until Goldstine told him of the Moore School project. Like a child with a new toy, he could not put it aside. When his consulting duties required him to visit the Manhattan Project, he took off for New Mexico, hut his mind was on our EDVAC architecture.

He must have spent considerable time at los Alamos writing up a report on our design for an EDVAC. This MSS he sent to Goldstine, with a letter stating that he had done this as an accommodation for the Moore School group who had met with him. But Goldstine mimeographed it with a title page naming only one author --- von Neumann. There was nothing to suggest that ANY of the major ideas had come from the Moore School Project!

Without our knowledge, Goldstine then distributed the “design for the EDVAC” outside the project and even to persons in other countries.

Small wonder, then, that computer history gave von Neumann the credit. Eckert and I, who left the Univ. of Penna. In 1946, no longer had access to the documents which might have helped to show “who did what, when.” But after many years, litigation has unearthed some of those documents, and historians can read what was once classified. But, even after declassification, those reports are not accessible to most people, since they were reproduced in such small quantities. Nevertheless, we hope that more historians will refer to them.

https://sites.google.com/a/opgate.com/eniac/Home/john-mauchly


http://conservancy.umn.edu/handle/11299/107275

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