21 Jun
2018
21 Jun
'18
5:53 a.m.
Making tube (valve) machines reliable was something originally sorted out by Tommy
Flowers, who understood, and convinced people with some difficulty I think, that you could
make a machine with one or two thousand valves (1,600 for Mk 1, 2,400 for Mk 2) reliable
enough to use, and then produced ten or eleven Colossi from 1943 on which were used to
great effect in. So by the time of Whirlwind it was presumably well-understood that this
was possible.
(This is not meant to detract from what Whirlwind did in any way.)
On 20 Jun 2018, at 21:11, Doug McIlroy
<doug(a)cs.dartmouth.edu> wrote:
If you extrapolate the rate of replacement of vacuum tubes in a 5-tube
radio to a 5000-tube computer (say nothing of the 50,000-tube machines
for which Whirlwind served as a prototype), computing looks like a
crap shoot. In fact, thanks to the maintenance protocol, Whirlwind
computed reliably--a sine qua non for the nascent industry.