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400 Years of Mechanical Calculating Machines
From BLOG@CACM

400 Years of Mechanical Calculating Machines

Germany is celebrating the 400th birthday of Schickard's "calculating clock."

ChatGPT Helps or Hurts our Cybersecurity?
From BLOG@CACM

ChatGPT Helps or Hurts our Cybersecurity?

The specter is that when fully mature, this technology would be able to generate undetectable attacks and the defenders will be constantly fighting these fires....

Can Transaction Costs Explain Scale-Free Networks Born by Preferential Attachment?
From BLOG@CACM

Can Transaction Costs Explain Scale-Free Networks Born by Preferential Attachment?

Centralization leads to more efficient communication and control, which leads to lower transaction costs, which increases the useful work each node can spend on...

Turing, Churchill, and the Colossus
From BLOG@CACM

Turing, Churchill, and the Colossus

Did Turing collaborate on the Colossus?

Where is the Cradle of the Computer?
From BLOG@CACM

Where is the Cradle of the Computer?

The digital computer of today arose in the first half of the 1940s independently in three different countries: Germany, the U.K. and the U.S.

InnovateFPGA: Wrong Strategy Drives One of the Best FPGA Development Contests into Crisis
From BLOG@CACM

InnovateFPGA: Wrong Strategy Drives One of the Best FPGA Development Contests into Crisis

In my opinion, the main problem of the InnovateFPGA contest is the lack of a permanent team to lead.

The Mesm: Ukraine Beats Russia
From BLOG@CACM

The Mesm: Ukraine Beats Russia

The Mesm is considered the first stored program digital computer in Continental Europe.

Leonardo Torres Quevedo, a Brilliant but Forgotten Spanish Inventor
From BLOG@CACM

Leonardo Torres Quevedo, a Brilliant but Forgotten Spanish Inventor

Although far ahead of his time, in the German- and English-speaking countries, Torres Quevedo has been largely forgotten.

High-Performance Mobile System-on-Chip Clusters
From BLOG@CACM

High-Performance Mobile System-on-Chip Clusters

Simply stating the problem is not enough; it is necessary to look for a quick way out of the situation, relying on available resources.

How Does One Divide with Napier's Rods?
From BLOG@CACM

How Does One Divide with Napier's Rods?

Napier's multiplication and division rods, deriving from the basic multiplication table, simplify calculations considerably.

How Does One Calculate With A Circular Slide Rule?
From BLOG@CACM

How Does One Calculate With A Circular Slide Rule?

The circular slide rule was widely used until the 1970s.

New Areas for Application of Self-Organizing Routing
From BLOG@CACM

New Areas for Application of Self-Organizing Routing

To organize the productive work of multiprocessor chips, it is necessary to establish an efficient distribution of computational processes between computational...

The World's Most Magnificent Historical Calculating Machines
From BLOG@CACM

The World's Most Magnificent Historical Calculating Machines

The design of today's electronic computers is usually not very appealing, in contrast to magnificent mechanical calculating machines from earlier times.

The World's Most Magnificent Historical Automatons
From BLOG@CACM

The World's Most Magnificent Historical Automatons

Automatons are ubiquitous. Some of the most magnificent works in the genre have survived in museums.

Superb Historical Robots
From BLOG@CACM

Superb Historical Robots

The world's most magnificent historical robots.

An Enigmatic Device from Denmark
From BLOG@CACM

An Enigmatic Device from Denmark

Discovery of a very rare surveying instrument in Denmark.

Tracking Down a Seminal Work on Computer Construction – in Russian
From BLOG@CACM

Tracking Down a Seminal Work on Computer Construction – in Russian

A Russian edition of Rutishauser's standard work on computer construction.

Discovery: User Manual of the Oldest Surviving Computer in the World
From BLOG@CACM

Discovery: User Manual of the Oldest Surviving Computer in the World

A rare find: the user manual of the oldest surviving computer in the world, the Zuse Z4 relay machine (1945).

Automatic Translators are Not Really Capable of Learning
From BLOG@CACM

Automatic Translators are Not Really Capable of Learning

One does not get the impression the Google Translate and DeepL translation programs are self-learning and have made real progress.

The World's Largest Commercial Cylindrical Slide Rule has a Scale Length of 24m
From BLOG@CACM

The World's Largest Commercial Cylindrical Slide Rule has a Scale Length of 24m

The world's largest mass-produced cylindrical slide rules come from Loga-Calculator AG in Zurich/Uster, Switzerland.
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