Why hasn't this abomination died yet?
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Antonio Meucci may have something to say about that…
He only sought a caveat (effectively a notice of intent to file) apparently, which means that while he might have invented it, he didn't properly tell other people in enough detail to allow them to reproduce what he had invented, and so doesn't really deserve fame. Bell, for all his faults, patented correctly and enabled everyone else to (eventually) benefit. That's a part of the patent system that I basically agree with.
Which isn't to say that the patent system is faultless, especially these days…
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Antonio Meucci may have something to say about that…
You're also forgetting the contributions of Arnold Telephone, you know, they guy they ended up naming the telephone in honour of...
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Johann Phillip Reis made a publication about it before Bell - and demonstrated it to various Prussian officials who just didn't care enough about it.
Filed under: Gotta love German bureaucracy
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Germans also would have taken credit for inventing the computer, if they'd bothered to actually help Konrad Zuse out.
Interestingly, even Google says ENIAC is first, even though now we know that's almost certainly not true. I don't think there's anything ENIAC could do that Zuse's Z3 couldn't.
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Zuse is widely acknowledged to be the inventor of the first computer here, actually.
If you want to see how the Z3 worked, you could go to Munich - they have a working replica there.
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What, the Antikythera mechanism gets no love there?
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Computer in this context is shorthand for "Turing-complete computer which stored its program in the same memory as its data."
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Oh, then that would be Babbage's analytical engine.
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"...and actually was built and used at least once"
I see you're doing well in your new career as an evil genie.
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"Turing-complete computer which stored its program in the same memory as its data."
@blakeyrat said:"...and actually was built and used at least once"
Then the first was built at my current employer: The University of Manchester. It was a test system for a memory technology based on CRTs that happened to be also the first computer that ticks all those boxes.I don't remember if I've met Tom Kilburn…
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1948 isn't even close. Z3 was running in 1941.
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Oh, then that would be Babbage's analytical engine.
That didn't store its program with its data though
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1948 isn't even close. Z3 was running in 1941.
Not sure the Z3 counts; punched tape isn't really the same as storing the program in a form where the program could rewrite itself as it executed. The SSEM could do that.
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I don't know for sure what capabilities it had, but using paper tape as a storage mechanism doesn't necessarily preclude it from being able to rewrite its own program. It'd just take a lot of paper.
Old IBM data sorting machines in the 1930s could both read and re-punch paper tapes, so the mechanics of it were well-known.
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1948 isn't even close. Z3 was running in 1941.
But didn't have a unified memory, and was only just Turing complete (it needed a very large input tape for that). The key thing about Zuse's machines were its arithmetic systems, which were well in advance of those used by others; Zuse appears to have been mainly interested in solving engineering problems and not in making a general computing system (intellectually a different type of challenge, especially at the time).
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Why is there no Noto monospaced font? I really like the sans and serif versions of the font.
The question is: why doesn't it just
font-family: monospace
and let the user decide through browser/OS settings what monospace font to use?
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Srly guys, why is Discourse still a thing?
I go to open this thread and see what is even being discussed and get this:
...which seems rather fitting.
And now 504 errors when I try to post this. Wonderful.
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let the user decide through browser/OS settings what monospace font to use?
When do you live, early nineties?
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Considering that he tried to build an NNTP front-end for Discforce, it doesn't seem too unlikely ...
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Considering that he tried to build an NNTP front-end for Discforce, it doesn't seem too unlikely ...
Oh yeah, that project. It's in the freezer, but not dead.
I'm going to resume working on that Real Soon Now™... A lot of RL stuff happened over the last few months, which used up all my free time.