1935 Meccano "Dam Busters" Computer Restored 175
rob1959 writes "A 1935 analog computer, built at Cambridge University and used to help plan the Dam Busters attacks on the Ruhr hydro dams in World War II, has been restored and put on display at Auckland's Museum of Transport and Technology. The computer came to NZ around 1950 and was used, ironically, to build hydro dams there — and to calculate rabbit population numbers."
Grandaddy rulez (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Grandaddy rulez (Score:5, Funny)
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Geeks have longer generation spans than the average population. If they reproduce at all, that is.
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That's irrelevant. Most people tend to reproduce in their 20's to 30's, younger depending about how far back you're talking. The lifespan doesn't matter as long as they live long enough to reproduce.
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You read "life span", I wrote "generation span". There's a difference.
Most people tend to reproduce in their 20's to 30's,
And geeks tend to reproduce later than that (if male, or not at all due to biological limits, if female). Hence their longer generation spans.
Re:Grandaddy rulez (Score:5, Funny)
Hmmm... my father was born in the 1930's making my grandfather old enough to be working on this project (not that he did). And, may I add, "Git off me lawn you young whipper-snappers!"
Re:Grandaddy rulez (Score:5, Informative)
I am 41 and my Grandfather was the right age to be working on this during WW2.
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31 here. Yes, my family is notorious for producing geeks and having really long generation cycles.
One upmanship (Score:2)
I am also 41 and my grandfather fought in WW1
I think this seems to show, at least in some cases, the generation gap may be increasing.
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All it goes to show is statistics are meaningless on an individual level.
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A "what did your [grand]father do in the war?" thread -- I didn't expect that.
My father was in German-occupied country, but too young to be taken into forced labor. Otherwise, he could presumably have worked on a vast range of exciting Axis technology.
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Not all slashdot readers are under 25 years of age.
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Rabbits? (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Rabbits? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Rabbits? (Score:4, Informative)
A woman about 20 years older than me told how her dad took the family on a holiday to Adelaide when she was a kid. All the way there and back (to Melbourne) they had to stop every 50 miles to scrape the rabbit carcases out of the wheel bays.
Re:Rabbits? (Score:4, Interesting)
Is this the Australian equivalent of walking to school through the snow, uphill both ways?
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Speaking of the 60's, I also had a large 1940-50ish meccano set with a clockwork motor that I inherited from my dad's mis-spent youth as a buding mechanical engineer. Make your own gyroscope, clockwork robot, grandfather clock (I said it was a large set)...and IIRC it also had instructions for something with a
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Or cats can eat rabbits too if they're hungry enough so maybe increasing the cat population in rabbit infested areas would help.
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If the Australian eco-system can't even compete with a little pussy cat then it's clearly in serious problems.
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In the lower half of the South Island, it's bad.
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- Deploy skipping bomb.
- Rabbit sees bomb skipping, gets horny.
- Rabbit attempts to mate with bomb.
- BOOM!
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Up until Myxomatosis took off they probably got eaten sometimes. After that, hardly at all.
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Maybe the rabbits can be processed into some kind of biofuel or industrial lubricant?
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Do the people in Australia and NZ realize that humans could eat rabbits?
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Call me off-topic but (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Call me off-topic but (Score:5, Interesting)
Yes, a very sad loss. I was not sure anyone (surprisingly) on Slashdot picked this up.
I was privileged to attend his final talk the week before, given at Edinburgh. The video is now actually available here (for a while): http://www.inf.ed.ac.uk/events/jamboree/2007/ [ed.ac.uk]
This was absolutely fascinating, and I listened spellbound for an hour and a half. Do not be misled by the title as it covered much of the early development of AI in Britain (not just at Edinburgh). Analogous with the actual topic of this story, it details another, very early "physical computer" MENACE - constructed of matchboxes and beads.
A fuller obituary (that goes way beyond his short involvement with Turing) is here: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/obituarie s/article2061886.ece [timesonline.co.uk]
Truly a great pioneer and inspiration for us modern researchers in AI.
I knew virtually nothing about this... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:I knew virtually nothing about this... (Score:5, Interesting)
I read the book years ago. In it the designers built a tank and used marbles as scale model bombs. It doesn't say anything about a computer used in the design. I wonder if information about the computer was left out for reasons of security.
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In the same vein you find multiple mentions of the use of the (exciting, new, and unusual) ENIAC in the development of the H-bomb, but very few mentions of
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I learnt when I was still a boy from my grandfather ( who was a spitfire pilot during the war ) whilst skimming stones and for everyone else there is the film Dambusters which is shown every Christmas and at periodic intervals throughout the year.
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~Cederic went to a school called 'Barnes Wallis' and another school called 'Merlin'.
The wonders of Meccano (Score:2)
In fact it was last really used in anger to build a remote control to perform a one off dangerous operation safely, and its loss probably cost the company a lot of money when POC models had to be engineered expensively by local contractors instead of being built quickly and cheaply by an engineer in house.
So RIP real Meccano. Doing FEA on a workstation jus
Dam Buster Sucked! (Score:5, Informative)
Operation Chastise did not have the military effect that was at the time believed. By 27 June, full water output was restored, thanks to an emergency pumping scheme inaugurated only the previous year, and the electricity grid was again producing power at full capacity. The raid proved to be costly in lives (more than half the lives lost belonging to allied POWs), but in fact no more than a minor inconvenience to the Ruhr's industrial output.
In his book Inside the Third Reich, Albert Speer expressed puzzlement at the raids; destruction of one of the dams served no purpose at all, he claimed, and the failure to follow up with additional raids represented a major lost opportunity for the Allies.
Re:Dam Buster Sucked! (Score:4, Interesting)
"An important reason for planning the raid was to persuade Stalin that Britain was capable of being an effective ally
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Re:Dam Buster Sucked! (Score:4, Interesting)
But our president is a douchebag. (Score:2)
Re:But our president is a douchebag. (Score:4, Informative)
The opposition cheered him and wanted him as PM after Sir Neville Chamberlain was unable to halt Hitler by appeasement.
Please read the six volumes of Second World War written by Churchill.
Am right now reading Gathering Storm after reading Heinz Guderian's Panzer Leader.
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There's certainly no reason to believe that Winston Churchill, of all people, would exaggerate his own role in winning World War II in his own written history of it. I mean, Winston Churchill. Of all people. Certainly a humble man.
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Once a project like that has started, no-one will ever cancel it, even if it is clear that it is not going to achieve anything, because no-one wants to be blamed for wasting all that money.
Re:Dam Buster Sucked! (Score:5, Interesting)
William
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(Not meant necessarily for the parent poster, but a comment on the thread in general).
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That's why I've been trying to share w/ my children all the stories I heard from my father about Vietnam and Korea, and from my uncles about World War II and from my great aunt who would relate stories of the Civil War she'd heard from her father (my great-grandfather), and of the Revolutionary War that her father had heard from Gen. Robert E. Lee (great-grandfather was one of his bodyguards) who had heard them from his father who was
You've just cherry-picked the worst paragraphs... (Score:5, Interesting)
" The strategic view
The Dams Raid was, like many British air raids, undertaken with a view to the need to keep drawing German defensive effort back into Germany and away from actual and potential theatres of ground war, a policy which culminated in the Berlin raids of the winter of 1943-44. In May 1943 this meant keeping the Luftwaffe and anti-aircraft defence forces' effort away from the Soviet Union; in early 1944, it meant clearing the way for the aerial side of the forthcoming Operation Overlord.
By far the greatest and most unexpected effect was on German food production. The Ruhr valley below the dams was a major source of vital food for Germany, and large areas of arable land were rendered unusable and huge numbers of farm animals were killed. This had an immediate negative effect on German morale. In addition, the pictures of the broken dams proved to be a morale boost to the Allies, especially to the British, still suffering under German bombing."
And of course, a major effect was to pursuade Harris to support Barnes Wallis's greatest contribution, the Tallboy and Grand Slam supersonic precision earth penetrators. These stopped the V2 and the V3, and sunk the Tirpitz, and well as the U-Boat pens at St Nazaire. The Americans wished they had something like them, and are only now developing something similar for use against Iran.
Re:You've just cherry-picked the worst paragraphs. (Score:4, Funny)
The Dams Raid was, like many British air raids, basically base camping to keep the uber-GER clan from capping flags and holding the helo spawn point. Though the RUS clan was previously unimpressed, it let them get four levels higher on the PWNAGE ladder. Three BRIT-"lol-nub" team tipped the scales and made some righteous Fraps vids for Youtube.
Re:You've just cherry-picked the worst paragraphs. (Score:2)
Unsurprising as they run counter to common historical opinion - which is that the raids accomplished little of lasting importance. In particular the conclusion about the effect of the Dambuster's raid on AA is nonsense because a) the dams and other important industrial targets were already protected by AA, and b) the raids on German cities were already drawing AA away from the Eastern Front. (As well as
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Right, using a nazi to judge the impact (Score:2, Insightful)
A, the raid was the first major blow the allies, especially england, managed to land againt the seeminly invincible germans. The raid proved that the germans could be hit, and deep inside their own country too. Morale matters, ask the americans about it sometime.(Vietnam, current conflict)
B, it forced german forces to be relocated inland to defend other possible targets from air attack. Every piece of equipment and soldier NOT at the front meant german fighting power was reduced.
C, the damage had to be repa
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Thank you for re-establishing my faith, shaken by a number of cogent, topical, and insightful posts this morning.
Contrary to Jerry Bruckheimer movies and the legions of strawmen erected by critics since time immemorial, wars are neither precise, predictable, or particularly neat things.
They involve a great deal of guesswork, opti
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Perhaps the most important effect, IMHO, was in restoring British moral badly damaged by continual German bombing. Read some of the comments by Br
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and the failure to follow up with additional raids represented a major lost opportunity for the Allies.
1) Speer denied the Holocaust through his trial, sentence and this same book, so we can safely conclude he is a proven liar.
2) The two claims are at odds, if it served no purpose, the why was it a major lost opportunity ?
Electronic Computers: A Made Simple Book, 1963 (Score:2)
Recently aired "Mystery:Foyle's War" related (Score:2)
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/mystery/foyleswar/series4
Great period series and this episode has specific ties to the topic at hand.
What's not mentioned (Score:5, Funny)
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Disappointment (Score:2)
Rabbit populations... (Score:2)
Differential Analyser in "When Worlds Collide" (Score:4, Informative)
Calculating machine, but no computer (Score:3, Insightful)
To be honest, in 1935 there were electronic tubes, and such a machine could have been implemented with them, therefore electronically. But probably the complexity and low reliability of electronic tubes of the time had rendered it unviable.
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The Only One??? (Score:2)
In that case, what is the one that is in the Science Museum, London?
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There is also a large Meccano-based differential analyser in the computing gallery
(in the NE corner - the other side from the Pegasus)
I'm pretty sure it is an original, not a replica - tho' I'm not quite so sure that it is
complete.
Andy
Differential analyzers (Score:2)
My analog computer experience (Score:4, Interesting)
analog multipliers along with them.
I took it to work where they had oscilloscopes I could use. One of the owners
of the company recognized what it was and told me it was an analog computer.
It had op-amp boards in it with a power backplane (you need +15 and -15 volts plus ground
for example). On the end of each board was a row of holes connected to various inputs
and outputs on the board.
There were other boards with nails coming out of them, that you could solder together
to make a "program". So you could switch from one program to another by pulling
out all the boards with nails and wires, re-arranging the op-amp boards, and putting in a different
set of boards with nails and wires.
I was in college at the time and they guy who explained how it all worked was
Ro Favreau. He had worked with analog computers for solving artillery
trajectory problems.
I remember fondly talking to him about it all and learning. I hope I will be able to pass on something I've learned over the years to some young man or woman engineer.
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By the standards of the day four square metres is small.
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Re:Apple reference (Score:4, Interesting)
Interestingly enough, the development of the Data General mini was written into a book, "The Soul of a New Machine" which was one of the first attempts to capture the group dynamics of a high-technology R&D effort in the world of computers. Good read.
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device would be two potentiometers. The GUI would
be a voltmeter.
I remember playing with a (I believe) Systron Donner Analog
computer several years ago. For what they do they are very
fast.
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How they worked ... (Score:2)
Afaik, they were released so they would bounce towards the dam, be stopped by hitting it, then sink to a certain depth before detonating.
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The entry for Bouncing Bomb [wikipedia.org] has a helpful animated illustration [wikipedia.org]. And, of course, the entry for Operation Chastise [wikipedia.org] is head and shoulders above the site that TFA links to.
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After Operation Chastise, the Germans discovered an Upkeep bomb that had failed to explode lying in some woods and subsequently a 385 kg (850 pound) version of the bouncing bomb was also trialed by the Luftwaffe. Designed for use against British shipping, it was given the codename Kurt, and was built at the Luftwaffe Experimental Centre in Travemünde. Not being a cricket playing nation, they failed to understand the importance of b
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