In Fred Hoyle’s science fiction novel, The Black Cloud, there is a computer in an early chapter that is clearly inspired by EDSAC. When they run a program on it, the process is just what you describe - they load a paper tape in through the tape reader, which Hoyle describes in detail.
I first read that book before I knew that in British English a vacuum tube is called a valve (from thermionic valve and which makes more sense than the American term, I think), so I was confused by the line about how warm the room was due to all of the valves!
I rewatched this series a few years ago and was surprised that it held up as well as it did. Yes, lots of sexism, but not untypical for that time. Like Star Trek, it had women in authority roles, but also in sexy outfits, so a bit of a mixed bag. They also got handsome Michael Billington out of his shirt a few times, which I found quite interesting for reasons that didn't become clear to me until some years later :)
Space:1999 started as a sequel to this series, set ten years later, on a greatly expanded Moonbase. They eventually abandoned that connection.
The opening credits theme music and editing are just brilliant.
It is a logistic problem at some level. A bunch of my parent's and sister's stuff went to Habitat ReStore or Goodwill. We have an architectural salvage place nearby that takes some things (like light fixtures) that the others don't.
When my sister died five years ago, her best friend, who was local and I wasn't, was a huge help to me in getting her house cleaned out. While neither my sister nor I have kids, my sister's two best friends do have kids who were her effective nieces and nephews. So we offered the kids anything they wanted that I didn't want (which wasn't much - just family stuff) and they took a surprising amount of it. Most of it was more modern furniture in good shape, which I didn't want. I got the antiques. One of the nieces wanted the very old china and crystal. So it is possible to get rid of a house full of things without trashing it all, but it can take time and that's not always practical.
I'm in the Maryland suburbs of Washington, DC, and self storage facilities are popping up around here like weeds. I have a storage unit and I'm trying to clear it out. I'm tired of the monthly fees that keep going up. I got it when I had to clear out my late sister's house and I wanted time to go through things and decide what to keep. When I moved last year, I got a larger unit, thinking I would need to declutter my townhouse prior to showing it. It turned out my agent wasn't that concerned about my clutter, but I did move some idle tech stuff into the unit. I was hoping to get a house with a big basement for my future tech hoarding needs, and I wanted to keep this stuff. As it turned out, I ended up in a rancher with no basement, so now I'm getting rid of old tech I'll never have space for. I'd have saved a lot of money if I'd just done that a year ago. I now have a much smaller unit that I hope to be rid of next year. Self storage units are definitely a mixed blessing.
I also have all of the family antique furniture, some of which goes back three or more generations. I have no heirs and no idea what I'll do with it all, but I don't want to leave it for my executor to deal with. At least it's in the house and not in an expensive storage unit.
I was looking at IKEA's home automation stuff, some of which uses the name TRÅDFRI and I thought the "FRI" part sounded like "free" and sure enough this just means "wireless". I'm guessing the "TRÅD" part is possibly a cognate of English "thread", so "thread free" is a literal translation. (I don't speak Swedish so forgive me if I'm completely off on this.)
A hidden “book server” like this could be set up in just about any electronic device with a sufficiently powerful microcontroller. But I think there is something delightfully poetic about using a source of light to spread suppressed knowledge.
A favorite film of mine. I was very happy when a decent quality bluray became available a few years back. I know someone who uses "Warn. There is another system." as an alternative to "Hello, world".
I've wondered if D.F.Jones knew of the British Colossus code breaking system and named his computer that to tweak the security people. They couldn't really object, since Colossus was still a secret. Jones was in the British military and it's not impossible that he knew of the project.
One of Asimov's best. I've often thought of naming a computer "multivac", as I'm a fan of the first generation computer names like ENIAC, EDSAC, etc. Multivac was, of course, a play on UNIVAC, suggesting multiple vacuum tubes instead of one! Multivac is, however, depicted as so powerful, I just don't think I've ever owned a system that deserved that name.
This sort of thing really bugs me! Marketing departments appropriate an existing term and use it in some new, often deceptive way. This goes all the way back to when IBM released “The IBM Personal Computer”, at a time when “personal computer” was a category name. Then Microsoft released Windows, when “windows” was a generic term for windowing systems. Intel did it with their “core” architecture. The list goes on.
A counter argument is that Mauchly was actually interesting in using computers for weather modeling and I’m sure that influenced the design of ENIAC. He could only get ENIAC funded if it was valuable to the war effort. I’ve read quite a lot about that machine and I’m not aware of any architectural features that were specific to ballistics calculations. This is unlike the British Colossus, another early computer, which was specifically designed for code breaking and wasn’t general purpose.
As for the objection that it wasn’t stored program, I was interested to learn that it was converted to stored program operation after only two years or so of operation, using the constant table switches as the program store. But the Manchester Baby, which used the same memory for code and data was more significant in the history of stored program machines.
On the general question of “first computer”, I think the answer is whatever machine you want it to be if you heap enough conditional adjectives on it.
I am a boomer and I absolutely give a "flying fink". Stop stereotyping my generation. The group I worked in at NASA Goddard did visualizations of climate data. I heard directly from climate scientists what was going on in the world and it terrified me. When I heard about what's being done to NCAR I nearly cried. I have no children but I have told all my friends' kids how sorry I am that we're leaving them a mess to clean up. How's that for a "flying fink"?
It's fun to play around with, but unless I'm missing something, it's not possible to specify the size, in rows and columns, of the screen, such as 24x80. It's an odd omission.
I remember those monitors, but I forget what resolution they were. For what it's worth, Toy Story was rendered at 1536 x 922. I believe they re-rendered the whole thing from the RIB files for the bluray release.
Film weave is also the bane of the VFX world. If a shot is going to have, say, a matte painting added in post, then a pin registered camera must be used. These cameras have a precisely machined pin that centers the film stock in the gate after the pull down claw retracts. Later post processing stages also use pin registered movements, so each frame is in exactly the same place every time it's used. Otherwise, the separate elements would weave against each other and give away the effect.
That was from Algol 68. Algol 60 used BEGIN/END blocks when the body of a do loop (or a then or else block, etc.) had more than one statement. Bash was influenced by Algol 68.
All I can think of is that it was a way to look at the end of a long program which wouldn't all fit on a display. Predating, I suppose, the 'tail' program, or whatever the DECSYSTEM 20 equivalent was.
Vowel length is generally not semantically significant in English. Vowels are lengthened before voiced consonants, for example, and we don’t even think about it. Compare “cab” and “cap”. As noted here, some Hungarian vowels, such as ’a’ and ‘e’ do change sound when lengthened, but some don’t. Those are the ones that are harder to distinguish for speakers of languages like English.