2015年12月11日
"It took me a year to understand
That, said Mr Barr, left the Edsac reconstruction project with a big problem. Namely, they did not have a clear idea of how the thing was wired up.
The project to recreate Edsac was undertaken to help fill gaps in knowledge about the way that this early British computer was built and worked. Once complete it will become a living exhibit at The National Museum of Computing where it will be used to help teach schoolchildren about programming.
The early months of the reconstruction scheme were taken up studying photographs of the finished computer to try to work out how its 3,000 valves were laid out and how they formed the logic that lent the machine its computational power.
Latterly, some plans for Edsac were discovered and have helped the builders confirm they were heading in the right direction. However, said Mr Barr, they turned up long after the heavy mental work had been done to understand the machine.
Image copyright The Edsac Project
Image caption James Barr has toiled in his shed to get the Edsac chassis working
"It took me a year to understand its five-bit order code," said Mr Barr. But understand it he did and his insights, along with those from fellow engineers who have worked on other key parts of the machine, has helped the project recreate Edsac's innards.
Which is where the sheds come in.
Those logical parts are being turned into hardware, known as chassis, in sheds and attics up and down the country. This has involved huge amounts of work as Edsac is built of 140 chassis spread around a series of tall racks. Each one is about 80cm long by 60cm wide, studded with valve sockets and stands in front of a spider's dream of wiring.
The project to recreate Edsac was undertaken to help fill gaps in knowledge about the way that this early British computer was built and worked. Once complete it will become a living exhibit at The National Museum of Computing where it will be used to help teach schoolchildren about programming.
The early months of the reconstruction scheme were taken up studying photographs of the finished computer to try to work out how its 3,000 valves were laid out and how they formed the logic that lent the machine its computational power.
Latterly, some plans for Edsac were discovered and have helped the builders confirm they were heading in the right direction. However, said Mr Barr, they turned up long after the heavy mental work had been done to understand the machine.
Image copyright The Edsac Project
Image caption James Barr has toiled in his shed to get the Edsac chassis working
"It took me a year to understand its five-bit order code," said Mr Barr. But understand it he did and his insights, along with those from fellow engineers who have worked on other key parts of the machine, has helped the project recreate Edsac's innards.
Which is where the sheds come in.
Those logical parts are being turned into hardware, known as chassis, in sheds and attics up and down the country. This has involved huge amounts of work as Edsac is built of 140 chassis spread around a series of tall racks. Each one is about 80cm long by 60cm wide, studded with valve sockets and stands in front of a spider's dream of wiring.
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