Sunday 20 May 2012

1953 March

A comment in a newly published book (George Dyson, Turing's Cathedral) caught my attention - "In March 1953 there were 53 kilobytes of high-speed random access memory on planet earth." The date made me stop because that was the month I was born. But also the fact of 53KB of RAM on earth, when today a single iPhone has 512MB of RAM, some 10,000 times more. And there are complaints that's not enough. Five of the 53 kilobytes were in the first all electronic digital computer as we understand the term today - MANIAC (Mathematical and Numerical Integrator and Computer) at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton.

And what may the MANIAC mathematicians and engineers have been reading?

Harlequin 218 - March 1953

Harlequin 218 back

Harlequin 220 - March 1953

Harlequin 220 back

Harlequin 221- March 1953

Harlequin 221 back

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