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Science
Friday > Archives
> 1999
> May
> May 7, 1999:
Hour One: A Computing Pioneer / Stone Tools and Human Origins
You've probably heard of ENIAC, the first electronic digital computer,
built in 1946. But have you ever heard of EDSAC, the first practical
version of a computer that could actually store a program?
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Fifty years ago this week, EDSAC (the Electronic Delay Storage
Automatic Calculator) went into operation at Cambridge University
in the United Kingdom. It contained 3,500 vacuum tubes and about
1K of memory, and clicked along at 714 operations per second.Initially,
those operations were used to do things such as square numbers
- and later to solve more complex equations. By feeding a string
of commands (there were eighteen different commands in all)
to the computer on a strip of paper tape, the calculations needed
to perform a calculation could be entered into the computer's
memory. Later users could then recall that operation without
having to reprogram the computer.
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We'll talk to Maurice Wilkes, inventor of the EDSAC, about his invention
- and about what it meant to be one of the first computer programmers
on the planet.
Then... early humans. This week, researchers announced that some
of the earliest known stone tools -- tools that are over 2.3 million
years old -- are much more advanced than previously thought. The findings,
according to the authors of a study published this week in the journal
Nature, may change what researchers believe about the skills
of our early ancestors.
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The tools, and the rock flakes chipped away to manufacture
them, were found by researchers a few miles west of Lake Turkana
in northern Kenya. The team pieced the flakes back together
to examine the process used in making them, revealing the degree
of thought put into their design. Last month in the journal
Science, other researchers reported finding evidence
at a 2.6 million year old site that stone tools had been used
on animal bones there. The scraping and cracking marks they
found on the bones are the earliest known examples of tool-assisted
meat eating.
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image courtesy H. Roche and A. Delagnes
click
for larger view
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What do these findings mean to the way scientists look at the human
family tree? We'll talk about it on this segment of Science Friday.
Guests:
Maurice Wilkes
Author, "Memoirs of a Computer Pioneer," (MIT Press)
Consultant, AT&T Laboratories
Professor Emeritus, Cambridge University
Cambridge, United Kingdom
Tim White
Professor, Integrative Biology
University of California-Berkeley
Berkeley, California
Craig Feibel
Professor, Geology and Anthropology
Member, Rutgers' Center for Human Evolutionary Studies
Rutgers University
New Brunswick, New Jersey
Links:
- Maurice
V. Wilkes' home page
- EDSAC
- Edsac
Simulator
- Ivars
Peterson's MathLand- programming the EDSAC, Part 1
- Ivars
Peterson's MathLand - programming the EDSAC, part 2
Anthropology
on the Internet of K-12 (Smithsonian)
The Lithics
Site (SUNY)
Mid-American Lithic Tools
Association
Anthropology
in the News (Texas A&M)
Books/Articles Discussed:
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by Maurice Wilkes
Roche, H., Delagnes, A., Brugal, J.-P., Feibel, C., Kibunjia,
M., Mourre, V., & Texier, P.-J. (1999). Early hominid stone
tool production and technical skill 2.34 Myr ago in West Turkana,
Kenya. Nature, 399, 57-60.
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This segment produced by:
Karin Vergoth
Web producer:
Charles Bergquist
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