The Victorian era of the United Kingdom was the period of Queen Victoria's rule from June 1837 to January 1901. This was a long period of prosperity for the British people, as profits gained from the overseas British Empire, as well as from industrial improvements at home, allowed a large, educated middle class to develop. Some scholars would extend the beginning of the period—as defined by a variety of sensibilities and political concerns that have come to be associated with the Victorians—back five years to the passage of the Reform Act 1832.
The era was preceded by the Georgian period and succeeded by the Edwardian period. The latter half of the Victorian era roughly coincided with the first portion of the Belle Époque era of continental Europe and other non-English speaking countries within Europe.
Before Palm Pilots and iPods, PCs and laptops, the term "computer" referred to the people who did scientific calculations by hand. These workers were neither calculating geniuses nor idiot savants but knowledgeable people who, in other circumstances, might have become scientists in their own right. When Computers Were Human represents the first in-depth account of this little-known, 200-year epoch in the history of science and technology.
Beginning with the story of his own grandmother, who was trained as a human computer, David Alan Grier provides a poignant introduction to the wider world of women and men who did the hard computational labor of science. His grandmother's casual remark, "I wish I'd used my calculus," hinted at a career deferred and an education forgotten, a secret life unappreciated; like many highly educated women of her generation, she studied to become a human computer because nothing else would offer her a place in the scientific world.
The book begins with the return of Halley's comet in 1758 and the effort of three French astronomers to compute its orbit. It ends four cycles later, with a UNIVAC electronic computer projecting the 1986 orbit. In between, Grier tells us about the surveyors of the French Revolution, describes the calculating machines of Charles Babbage, and guides the reader through the Great Depression to marvel at the giant computing room of the Works Progress Administration.
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Born December 26, 1791 in Teignmouth, Devonshire UK, Died 1871, London; Known to some as the "Father of Computing" for his contributions to the basic design of the computer through his Analytical machine. His previous Difference Engine was a special purpose device intended for the production of tables.
-There could have been less casualties if Babbage's machine had been made...accounts of deaths could have been lessen and conflicts resolved.3.)
LONDON - A rebuilt World War II code-cracking computer developed to intercept Nazi messages lost to a desktop computer Friday in a contest to decipher an encrypted radio message.
The challenge marked the first time the Colossus machine had been used since former Prime Minister Winston Churchill ordered models of the top secret computer destroyed, according to Britain's National Museum of Computing, which organized the contest.
Churchill had feared Britain's national security would be threatened if the state of the art computer's technical details ever leaked outHowever, not only was Colossus beaten by a home computer, but by one in Germany.
Bonn-based software engineer Joachim Schueth deciphered the message, which was encrypted by a Nazi-era Lorenz cipher machine and transmitted by radio from Paderborn, Germany. It took him two hours Thursday, using ham radio equipment and a computer program he wrote especially for the challenge.
Schueth paid tribute to Colossus and those who used it during WWII at the Bletchley Park code-breaking center, outside London, saying their work was important to Germans because "it helped to shorten the lifetime of the Nazi dictatorship."
But Colossus, the world's first programable computer, was no match for its electronic descendants, he said.
"Putting Colossus in a competition with modern computers may be a bit unfair," Schueth wrote on his Web site.
Colossus eventually completed the challenge at 1:15 p.m. Friday, taking three hours and 35 minutes, after overcoming difficulties intercepting the distant radio signal and repairing a blown valve.
"We've lost appreciation of just how hard it was to intercept signals, interpret them and put them on Colossus and run them," said Andy Clark, director of the Bletchley Park-based computing museum.
"The past two days have brought into sharp focus just how hard they had to work," he said.
Experts spent 14 years rebuilding the Colossus using stolen design plans and by gleaning information from those who helped create the original.
Harold Thomas Flowers - British engineer who led the developers of Colossus, one of the first electronic digital computers, which broke complex codes used by the Germans during World War II and thus enabled the Allies to gain valuable military information; the use of Colossus was said to have shortened the war by two years (b. Dec. 22, 1905, London, Eng.--d. Oct. 28, 1998, London).
Max Newman - Max Newman was born Maxwell Neumann in Chelsea, London, England, on 7 February 1897.His father was Herman Alexander Neumann, originally from the German city of Bromberg (now Bydgoszcz, Poland) who had emigrated with his family to London at the age of 15. Herman worked as a secretary in a company, and married Sarah Ann Pike, an English schoolteacher, in 1896. The family moved to Dulwich in 1903, and Max attended Goodrich Road school, then City of London School from 1908. He won a scholarship to study mathematics at St John's College, Cambridge in 1915, and in 1916 gained a first in part I of the Mathematical Tripos.
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Artificial Intelligence (AI) is usually defined as the science of making computers do things that require intelligence when done by humans. AI has had some success in limited, or simplified, domains. However, the five decades since the inception of AI have brought only very slow progress, and early optimism concerning the attainment of human-level intelligence has given way to an appreciation of the profound difficulty of the problem.
The field of computer science and engineering concerned with creating robots, devices that can move and react to sensory input. Robotics is one branch of artificial intelligence.
Robots are now widely used in factories to perform high-precision jobs such as welding and riveting. They are also used in special situations that would be dangerous for humans -- for example, in cleaning toxic wastes or defusing bombs.
Although great advances have been made in the field of robotics during the last decade, robots are still not very useful in everyday life, as they are too clumsy to perform ordinary household chores.
Robot was coined by Czech playwright Karl Capek in his play R.U.R (Rossum's Universal Robots), which opened in Prague in 1921. Robota is the Czech word for forced labor.
The term robotics was introduced by writer Isaac Asimov. In his science fiction book I, Robot, published in 1950, he presented three laws of robotics:
1. A robot may not injure a human being, or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
2. A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.
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he worst of the pulse lasts for only a second, but any unprotected electrical equipment — and anything connected to electrical cables, which act as giant lightning rods or antennas — will be affected by the pulse. Older, vacuum tube (valve) based equipment is much less vulnerable to EMP; Soviet Cold War–era military aircraft often had avionics based on vacuum tubes. There are a number of websites that explore methods for protecting equipment in the home or business from the effects of an EMP attack.
Many nuclear detonations have taken place using bombs dropped by aircraft. The aircraft that delivered the atomic weapons at Hiroshima and Nagasaki did not fall out of the sky due to damage to their electrical or electronic systems. This is simply because electrons (ejected from the air by gamma rays) are stopped quickly in normal air for bursts below 10 km, so they do not get a chance to be significantly deflected by the Earth's magnetic field (the deflection causes the powerful EMP seen in high altitude bursts), but it does point out the limited use of smaller burst altitudes for widespread EMP.
