Re: tlug: parallel-port IDE

[Karl-Max Wagner <karlmax@example.com>]

> Sounds reasonable to me, because virtually all computer technology
> derives from English-speaking communities. User interfaces can be

???? And where do you think the term "Urlader" comes from ? Yes,
I mean that little chunk of code that loads the first sector on
disk and thus initiates the bootloading process.

It is german and means "primordial loader", litterally
translated. The term was coined by Konrad Zuse, one of the most
brilliant minds in computer history.

Computer technology is the result of joint efforts of many
people from many cultures and nations. To see what I mean let's
dig a bit into computr history.

The first mechanic computing device - in fact a mechanical
desktop calculator - was designed and built by Wilhelm Schickard
in the eighteenth century ( yes, middle Edo Jidai ). Schickard
was a German. The design actually was sure the most successful
device in computing history so far, it was built with some
improvements until the advent of electronic desktop calculators
litterally in the billions over more than two centuries.

The next serious attempt was in the ninetenth century. Charles
Babbage and his assistant Lady Ada Wentworth, Countess of
Lovelace, tried to give it a big crack and to build a real big,
punched tape controlled machine. Due to lack of funding and
major technical problems the project failed.

However, Ada Wentworth did theoretical research on languages for
such machines. In the process she created the first assembly
language. Many basic concepts like conditional branches were
introduced by her. The programming language Ada has been named
in her honour. She was the first programmer in human history.

Thee was also research on formalistic logic by Boole, however,
at the time Boole had no application for computers in mind.

In the meantime the telephone started it march to world
dominion. Telephone networks became bigger and bigger and
clearly something better than hand operated exchanges were
necessary. 

An american funeral entrepreneur who was angry because his
competitors always bribed the exchange personnel to switch
people with funerals at hand decided to get rid of all that hand
operations in exchanges and decided to automate the whole
business. His name was Strowger and the year was 1896.

To say that his invention was a big success would be an
understatement. He actually stopped his funeral business shortly
after because the burgeoning Strowger Automatic Telephone
Exchange Corp. required his full attention.

Telephone exchanges were the first highly complex automatic
systems mankind ever built. It also showed that the
electromechanical relay was an excellent component for buildig
highly complex logical machinery.

This is an important fact. Without even being aware of that,
Strowger paved the way towards modern computer technology.

The next major attempt was done already in the early thirties of
the twentieth century. This time it was a student of
construction engineering named Konrad Zuse. He was German.

The guy disliked the lengthy calculations to be done in his
profession. So he decided to build a machine that could do that
for him. After two years of work together with some friends it
was finished in 1935. It was the Z1.

Due to this work Zuse gained a lot of insight into the problems
of mostly mechanical computers. He scavenged all nearby
libraries for useful information. He thus ran into the writings
of Boole and Ada Wentworth. This gave him the theoretical
foundation for his later work.

He started designing a new machine, this time mainly using
telephone relays. He got them from the junk piles of local
telephone people.

He built a test machine to try out his new ideas, the Z2. The
machine ran satisfactorily. So he decided to built a really
advanced machine. It was finished in 1941 in wartime Berlin and
called the Z3.

This machine was the first modern computer ever built. It used
the architecture now known as Von Neumann architecture, just
almost a decade earlier ( so in fact it should be called Zuse
architecture.... ). The basic architecture of this machine is
pretty much the same as that of the PC sitting on your desktop.
It was a computer in the modern sense of the word.

This can't be said of any other efforts of that time. Neither
Colossus, the huge machine built in Bletchley Park in the UK
under the direction of Alan Touring nor Mark II by Mauchly and
Eckert can claim that. These machines, as well as the later
ENIAC were basically calculators with patchboard
programmability. They could not load a program into memory and
run it from there. The Z3 could do that. It was about 10 years
earlier than any other comparable machine.

This is all the more astonishing as Zuse was mostly working on
his own. Besides a little bit of money from here and there he
had no support whatsoever.

Around the time the Z3 was under construction Zuse's friend
Schreyer worked on his doctoral thesis. The title: "Ueber die
Verwendung von Elektronenroehren in selbsttaetigen
Rechenanlagen" ( The use of electron tubes in automatic
computing equipment ).

Somehow Zuse managed to get the Z3 transported out of bomb
raided Berlin and took it to Oberammergau. Later on it was set
up at Zurich university until it was decommissiond in the mid
50's.

Finally the Americans caught up and built the UNIVAC I. It was
similar to the Z3 and already equipped with tubes.

Somehow Fujitsu got wind of the Z3 and built a machine which is
pretty much a copy of the Z3 in 1952. You can admire it at their
research labs ( and you can admire the Z3 at the Deutsches
Museum here in Munich. I saw both ).

At the end of the war Zuse already saw the need for high level
programming languages. He wrote several papers about its design.
He called it Plankalkuel. Its conception was far ahead of
anything even in the planning stage by then. It was much more
advanced as FORTAN or even ALGOL. Actually it was pretty much on
a par with the state of the art in the 70's. Unfortunately it
was never implemented ( this could change - Eric Raymond and
some others from the Retrocomputing museum are working towards
that. Eric seems to be quite a fan of Plankalkuel ).

With the Cold War and the space project the US were pumping
unbelievable sums into computer research. At the same time
Europe was seriously suffering from the aftermath of WW II. So
it's no wonder that the US got topsides in it - at least for a
while. 

At the end of the seventies this was drawing to an end. It was
the great time of computer startups, among them a company that
was about to inscribe itself into history: Eberhard Faerber's
PCS. This was in Munich.

This company developed the concept of workstations. The idea was
to build desktop computers based on the 68000 by Motorola, put
them on every desk and connect them by ethernet. The OS ? UNIX.
It in fact was the first major commercial application of UNIX
and quite bold as UNIX at the time was considered a pure hacker
OS ( see the parallels to Linux ? ).

The company later foundered due to gross management mistakes.
However, during the time of its existence another guy was
studying at the Technical University in Munich. His name was
Andreas von Bechtoldsheimer, better known as Big Andy and
principal founder of Sun Microsystems.

It need to be said here that Eberhard Faerber is professor of
informatics at TU Munich and Andy was one of his students. Of
course he was aware of what was going on at PCS ( who wasn't at
that time ...... ).

Later on Big Andy went as an exchange student to Berkeley. He
soon founded a company, Sun Microsystems, which successfully
duplicated the concept of PCS, which was new in the US.

The rest is history. After PCS foundered Sun got its toghest
competitor off its throat and thrived until it became what it is
now.

The latest major thing conceived of in a non English setting is
- of course - Linux. As we all know, Linus Torvalds is a Finn.
His native language is Swedish ( not Finnish - he belongs to the
Swedish minority. Finnish and Swedish are both official
languages in Finland ).

Maybe not everybody is aware of the fact that Finland culturally
is totally different from the rest of Europe. There are even
phenotypical differences: most of the finnish population is of
the finnougrian type and they come from the Ural region in
central Russia. It is believed that part of the Japanese came
from there, too.

The language also is totally different. If you want to get an
impression of what Finnish culture looks like, read their
national epos, the Kalevala ( it's the equivalent to Man'yoshu
in Japan ).

Never forget that Europe is not a culturally uniform region. We
have four different language groups here ( Germanic, Romanic,
Slawic and Finnougrian ) which have pretty much nothing in
common. The same goes for the respective cultures. We Europeans
just have got used such a lot to that that we rarely think about
it and cosider it normal. This is why foreigners often are
mistaken in thinking that we have a lot in common. We have not.
It is the result of a long learning process that forced us to
become cosmpolitans.

So computer technology grew up in this multicultural setting.
However, due to the need of a common language we de facto agreed
to the standard of English. This, however, doesn't mean that
computing is linked in any way to the language. It is not, of
course ( actually, the idea of a link between a technology and a
language is a most weird one and I simply fail to grasp how such
a thing could be ).

It is certainly a fact that working in complex scientific and
technical fields requires an adequately structured and
disciplined way of using one's mind. However, there I am stunned
even more: isn't a large part of Japanese culture about
structuring and disciplining one's thinking and feelings ? Or
has the ongoing process of throwing out its own culture in Japan
already resulted in losing this already so that the link can't
be made any more ? 

Leaves me in a pensive mood....

> localized, but besides that there's always something that's fundamentally
> different from the way the Japanese think and work. The real language
> barrier.

See above.......

================================================================
"It was hell. They knew it.          Karl-Max Wagner
  But they called it                 karlmax@example.com
    W-I-N-D-O-Z-E"
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