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From: Mark Williams on 26 Jul 2010 19:57

"SteveH" <italiancar(a)gmail.com> wrote in message
news:1jm9f8z.s0wnhhxete43N%italiancar(a)gmail.com...
> Mark Williams <spam.me(a)your.peril> wrote:
>
>> > computer,
>>
>> hard to say, there were many designes being built around the same time
>
> Depends on the definition - arguably, the first recognisable computer
> was built by Alan Turing. A Brit.

Myth. The Turing machine was a mathematical concept, but was never built
(well, not by Turing and not until much later). The "bombe"'s that he had
built during the war for decryption was a refinement of an earlier Polish
device, and not really a computer n the modern sense. After the war Turing
designed a computer at the National Physical Laboratory (ACE), but his
design was rejected and he left and went to the University of Manchester.
While he was at Manchester scientists there built the Manchester Mark1
(without Turing), while scientists at Cambridge built the EDSAC, both based
on design from John von Neumann. The NPL ACE was not built until 18 months
later.

>> > personal computer,
>>
>> depends what you mean. There were single user small computers from many
>> sourrces in the mid to late 70s. The Sinvlair ZX80 preceded the IBM PC
>> by a
>> year, but neither was the first of its kind.
>
> First recognisable PC was made by Wang in the early 70s - by this I mean
> a desktop machine with monitor and a way of loading programs - in this
> case, a cassette drive.
>
> So, the Yanks have that one.

The first PC was probably the Datapoint 2200 frpom 1970, supposedly a
terminal but actually programmable and running on an Intel 8008 8-bt
microprocessor.

>> > and internet right here on American shores.
>
> But it was a Brit. who came up with a way to make the Internet usable by
> anyone other than geeks and scientists.

Not quite. He responded to a request from the EU to develop a hypertext
based browser that interpreted a markup language (neither of which were new
technologies), so the idea should probably be credited to Brussels
bureaucrats, although both hypertext (Xerox Parc) and mark up languages
(IBM) both came from the US.

Here is a detail from a hypertext conference from1 1987, 3 years before the
WWW:
http://www.interaction-design.org/references/conferences/proceedings_of_acm_hypertext_87_conference.html,
and if you search you will find references to GML from 1980 or thereabouts.
For many years TBL was very reluctant to claim any credit for the WWW. Nice
guy though he undoubtedly is, that isn't necessarily down to modesty.

>> > There are always more foreigners wanting to come to America and see
>> > what
>> > is what than there are Americans who have had enough and want to move
>> > out.
>> > I wonder why that is?
>>
>> Lots of empty space
>
> I'd say it was education - the average European has a better standard
> and better spread of educational knowledge than the average Yank.
>
> A large proportion of Yanks wouldn't be able to place their own state on
> a map, let alone know where Stockholm was, for example.
>
>
> --
> SteveH


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