Computer
In November 1937, George Stibitz, then working at Bell Labs, completed a relay-based calculator he dubbed the "Model K" (for "kitchen table", on which he had assembled it), which calculated using binary addition. Replicas of the "Model K" now reside in the Smithsonian Institution, the William Howard Doane Library at Denison University and the American Computer Museum in Bozeman, Montana where the George R. Stibitz Computer and Communications Pioneer Awards are granted. Bell Labs subsequently authorized a full research program in late 1938 with Stibitz at the helm. Their Complex Number Calculator, completed January 8, 1940, was able to do calculations on complex numbers. In a demonstration to the American Mathematical Society conference at Dartmouth College on September 9, 1940, Stibitz used a teletype to send commands to the Complex Number Calculator in New York over telephone lines. It was the first computing machine ever used remotely over a phone line. (See the commemorative plaque and the hall where this event took place in the photos below.)
Read more about this topic: George Stibitz
Famous quotes containing the word computer:
“The analogy between the mind and a computer fails for many reasons. The brain is constructed by principles that assure diversity and degeneracy. Unlike a computer, it has no replicative memory. It is historical and value driven. It forms categories by internal criteria and by constraints acting at many scales, not by means of a syntactically constructed program. The world with which the brain interacts is not unequivocally made up of classical categories.”
—Gerald M. Edelman (b. 1928)
“What, then, is the basic difference between today’s computer and an intelligent being? It is that the computer can be made to see but not to perceive. What matters here is not that the computer is without consciousness but that thus far it is incapable of the spontaneous grasp of pattern—a capacity essential to perception and intelligence.”
—Rudolf Arnheim (b. 1904)