November 07, 2016 Monday
Bedtime Story
Making Manchester SSEM To Test A New Form of Storage
Making Manchester SSEM To Test A New Form of Storage
Williams and Kilburn set to work on their cathode ray memory and
improve it.
To begin with, their tube could store just 1 bit of memory (please
don’t laugh as it was a tremendous feat then).
Later they raised it to 2,048 bits by making an array of 64 X 32
on the phosphor screen.
More crucially, the storage time was increased to 4 hours.
They also borrowed an engineer Geoff Tootill for 2 years from 1947
to 1949 from TRE.
This team of 3 got unadulterated support from Max Newman who was
now held the Chair of Pure Mathematics at the Manchester University.
He was one of the codebreaker at the Bletchley Park during the war
and along with Tommy Flowers shepherded the team to build the Colossus series
of code-breaking computers.
It was his 1935 lectures on the Foundations of Mathematics and
Gödel’s Theorem that inspired Alan Turing to attack the Decision Problem posed
by David Hilbert.
This team finally built a 17 feet long behemoth that weighed 1 ton
and was named Baby or otherwise known as the Manchester Small-Scale
Experimental Machine (SSEM).
Retrospectively and with the benefit of hindsight, it really
turned out to be the baby of the computing world.
For this team, SSEM was not a computing machine.
Rather it was a devise or a testing ground for the practical
working of a cathode ray tube based memory.
The machine had 300 diodes and 250 pentodes (we had dealt with
them in some past night) which would serve as the arithmetic unit.
This machine used 4 Williams Tube which carried out the following
functions:
One actually provided the 32 by 32-bit random access memory.
The second served as the accumulator or the register that stored
the intermediate results of the arithmetical calculation.
The third one held the program instructions as well as their
address.
The fourth one acted what a cathode ray tube was originally used for,
a display device.
For programming it used a 3-bit instruction set thereby limiting
the maximum number of instructions to 23 i.e. 8.
Stay tuned to the voice of an average story storytelling
chimpanzee or login at http://panarrans.blogspot.in/
Good night and my fellow cousin ape.
Another great educator and a teacher that I am aware of is
Professor Subhashish Chattopadhyay in Bangalore, India.
While I narrate stories, Professor Subhashish an electronic
engineer and a former professor at BARC, does and teaches real mathematics and
physics.
He started the participation of Indian students at the
International Physics Olympiad.
Do visit him here:
All his books can be downloaded for free through this link:
For edutainment and English education of your children, may I
suggest this large collection of Kids Songs:
Max Newman the mathematician and the code breaker who inspired Alan Turing
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