Ralph C. Merkle was born on February 2, 1952. He was one of the inventors of public key cryptography – a security methodology that today’s internet and communications rely on heavily. The discovery and publishing dates for public key cryptography gets a bit confusing – I am sure a white …
Noughts and Crosses. A Platinum Jubilee Fact.
In 1952 one of the first computer games was programmed and run on a computer the size of your house! Alexander Douglas was studying at Cambridge University for a PhD, when he wrote a simulation of Noughts and Crosses (known in other places as ‘Tic-Tac-Toe’), as part of his thesis …
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Because It’s Friday – Scope this out…
It is a Bank Holiday long weekend here, to celebrate the Platinum Jubilee of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II – so here is a really quick “Because It’s Friday“. Here is a Randall Munroe take on various types of “scopes” and what they can “see”: xkcd: Types of Scopes Because …
IBM 726 dual tape drive. A Platinum Jubilee Fact.
There was a time, in TV and movie history, when if you needed to show a really powerful computer, then it needed lots of big cabinets with big spinning tapes – for example have a look at the image above from the 1964 film Dr Strangelove or the example below …
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How many transistors are there in the processor in your computer? A Platinum Jubilee Fact.
I have an Intel i7 processor in my laptop – and a quick Google search on the model of chip did not give an exact answer, but it must be billions – so quite a lot. The modern computer age owes it’s birth to the discovery of the transistor – …