.
Rebuilding EDSAC is a years-long project, but it is looking more and more like a computer, well, like the original EDSAC (half a room full of racks with valves/tubes) and is apparently likely to be running programs by late summer.
Quote:
The EDSAC was the world's first stored-program computer to operate a regular computing service. Designed and built at Cambridge University, England, the EDSAC performed its first calculation on 6th May 1949.
Here's
a short video update posted today, about the storage implementation - this is one place where the reconstruction chooses not to be original, filling the coffin not with mercury delay lines but modular electronic delay units:
Here's
the set of EDSAC videos from TNMoC (The National Museum of Computing) in a random order.
Here's a
poster (pdf) all about EDSAC and the initial orders - what we now call a bootstrap - and also Maurice Wilkes' test program which tabulated some squares and differences. The machine has a multiply instruction, which is surely a huge boost in utility as the machine is serial and ran at a rate of 600 instructions per second.
The National Museum of Computing is on the Bletchley Park campus, and very well worth a visit. I think I must have been four or times by now. (The Bletchley Park museum is also on the BP campus, with separate entrance fee, and is also worth a visit, but doing both justice in one day will prove to be a stretch. BP is an hour's train journey from London.)
