George Dyson's continued downplaying of British computing efforts is tiresome

Re:George Dyson's continued downplaying of British computing... by andyjohnson0 on Thursday March 08, 2012 @09:03AM (#3679717)

George Dyson is the son of the physicist Freeman Dyson, who worked at the Institute for Advance Study from 1953 during the time when von Neumann et al were building the IAS computer. He (George) gave a talk [1] in 2008 where he mentioned that he used to hang out at the IAS as a child and met von Neumann, Kurt Godel, and others. This probably explains his emphasis on the IAS and von Neumann.

I do agree with the opinion expressed in the article, though, that the British contribution tends to be downplayed. But as a brit myself we're used to that...

The Manchester Baby is in the science museum here in Manchester and its worth a look if you somehow find yourself in Manchester. The long-now talk is interesting, but you might want to fast-fwd past the stuff about canoes and tree houses.

http://longnow.org/seminars/02004/jan/09/theres-plenty-of-ro...

EDIT: typo

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Re:George Dyson's continued downplaying of British computing... by rst on Thursday March 08, 2012 @09:31AM (#3679809)

The Manchester machines were very significant for at least two reasons. First off, they were the first to feature "Williams tube" CRT memory, which was the high-speed memory of choice in any early computer effort that could afford it (including the IAS machine which is Dyson's subject, and for which he apparently fails to give Williams proper credit).

Second, it was the first machine to feature any kind of an index register, a facility that was quite widely copied. You can trace the influence from the spread of the Manchester name for the facility: they called it the "B-tube", a reference to the internal structure of their own machine. (Already having an "A-tube" for the accumulator, and a "C-tube" for control registers, they used the first free letter.) And if you read through the computing literature of the '50s, you'll find frequent references to index registers using terms like "B-boxes", which are otherwise inexplicable.

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Re:George Dyson's continued downplaying of British computing... by kamjam on Thursday March 08, 2012 @11:27AM (#3680294)

I do agree with the opinion expressed in the article, though, that the British contribution tends to be downplayed. But as a brit myself we're used to that...

I tend to find that is the case. Us brits tend to be less brash and more modest than our US counterparts.

On the flip side, we tend to be called unfriendly because of it!

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