The National Museum of Computing in Bletchley is doing a replica build of the first computer for general use which stood on the University of Cambridge in 1949. The Edsac was the first computer that does not have a very specific purpose served, as was then customary.
The rebuilding of such a piece of engineering from 1949, is no easy feat. Especially how the electronics is connected gives a lot of problems in the project, reports the BBC. In the first instance, used the volunteers that are involved with the rebuilding of old pictures to find out how the schematics of the computer in each other were and how the three thousand electronic valves and tubes to negotiate with one another. The work on the Edsac, or Electronic Delay Storage Automatic Calculator has been steady and project manager Andrew Herbert hopes that the computer in the spring of 2016 work. The original computer was in the fifties scrapped and parts sold at auction. A part of the computer was in February this year discovered in the United States. The owner of the part Chassis 1A has donated to the project.
Edsac was the first computer that researchers actually as a scientific calculator could use. The team that has the machine built, wanted the programming as simple as possible, says Herbert, in an interview with an Australian radio station. The machine had no transistors, let alone a printed circuit board or integrated circuits. It was an electronic machine which used electronic valves and tubes and took up about two square feet of floor area in attachment. The whole was built up from about 140 boards with electronics. All together it weighs about 2000 kilograms and slurps 11 kilowatts.
The machine had a kind of memory, so-called delay line memory that consists of tubes containing mercury. Information was stored in the mercury by the use of sound waves. This technology is not used in the rebuilt computer, because it is relatively unstable, and mercury is extremely toxic. All the electronics was good for a thousand words of memory, equivalent to about 3 kilobytes. The computer was 650 instructions per second. In comparison with a student with slide rule was the computing power of the computer is about 1500 times bigger. This allowed Cambridge certain science run, which had not been possible without a computer, such as for röntgenkristalstructuuranalyse to the structure of hemoglobin in blood to find out. Astronomers made use of to apertuursynthese to perform. That last one is combining signals from several telescopes so that a larger telescope to simulate.