At Area Science Park in Trieste they had a VAX 9000 as scientific mainframe. It cost 2.5 billion lira and its maintenance cost was 250 million lira/year. Then BULL installed a MIPS R6000 Unix minicomputer which cost 250 million lira and its maintenance cost was 25 million lira/year. I was its manager. CERN asked me for an account to run the LINPACK test on it. I gave it to them, and its speed was equal to the VAX, so the VAX was scrapped. DEC was acquired by Compaq, which was acquired by HP, which still exists. Sic transit gloria mundi.
Tullio

---

Speaking of VAX and Digital Equipment Corp. I worked in the Army's Computer Techniques Team at Fort Monmouth's Electronics Command back in the 60's. One of my co-workers was Captain Bob Glorioso who went on to head up Digital Equipment Corp 's (DEC) high speed computing division.

At the time we worked on threshold logic and so called "artificial nueuons."
Fort Monmouth funded and developed a lot of the early computer work such an the ENIAC and the Illiac 1 and Illiac 4.

I still have a photocopy of the 14 March 1964 issue of Business Week which speaks of the PDP-6 and its developers, Gordon Bell and Richard Best. The title is 'A computer that grows with you'. Of course it was on a PDP-8 that both Unix and the C language were born at Bell Laboratories.
Tullio

---

I still have a photocopy of the 14 March 1964 issue of Business Week which speaks of the PDP-6 and its developers, Gordon Bell and Richard Best. The title is 'A computer that grows with you'. Of course it was on a PDP-8 that both Unix and the C language were born at Bell Laboratories.
Tullio

It was Ritchie and Thompson that both worked with BCPL (Basic Combined Programming Language), which was used on Multics. It was the basis for the B language developed by Thompson for UNIX on the 18-bit PDP-7 from the Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC).
Ritchie modified B, which eventually became the C programming language. It was designed to be adapted to new hardware like the 16-bit DEC PDP-11. Ritchie and Thompson received the ACM Turing Award in 1983 for their work on C as well as UNIX Unics (Uniplexed Information and Computing Service).
http://electronicdesign.com/dev-tools/thompson-ritchie-and-kernighan-fathers-c

PDP-11:) I have worked with one.
And using this tutorial. I wonder when they release D language:)

There is C++ but I am too old to learn it.
Tullio

---

There is C++ but I am too old to learn it.
Tullio

C++ is just an add-on to C. Hence the name which means C=C+1.
A C source code compiles just as same with a C++ compiler. No changes needed.
It's never too late to learn Tullio:)

Well, I tried to learn all about the Higgs boson via the University of Edinburgh online course, and I got a 91/100 score on its tests. But programming is a different thing and it is best left to young people. I once learned to program in LOGO, which is an interpreted language far superior to BASIC but it seems to have been abandoned. I still have a copy of it in my Olivetti AT&T UNIX PC, a.k.a. PC7300 or Safari. Sometimes I fire it up and try to remember what I once knew.
Tullio

---

Sorry that we are off topic but all of us old fools like to reminisce about the good old days. When I worked for Bell Labs in Holmdel in 1984 I didn't have much vacation that first 6 months so I worked over Christmas and vowed to learn C. I figured that it would be easy since I had taught Fortran, BASIC, IBM assembler and Algol in college. i also could program a variety of Army computers including the FADAC Mortar locator computer.

Well I started the book by Richie and it seemed to define things in terms of other undefined things. It looked like a bad version of PL-1 wriiten by a drunkard. I soon gave up the effort and concentrated on learning various versions of UNIX instead. I too had an ATT 7300 Unix PC--I loved it and it was the first multiprocessing machine that I had seen. I also introduced the Macintosh into the Labs and when I left they were thinking about starting a Mac Users club there in Holmdel.
.
I could soon write a detailed report with a single GREP command, and that was all i needed to get by with writing programs.

The PDP 8 was a landmark computer. It was called: PDP (Programmed Data Processor) since many universities and government labs carefully reviewed any purchase requests for "COMPUTERS" and it was thought that this might circumvent this scrutiny and red tape. I once had the duty of reviewing all departmental computer requests at the University of Illinois so we were on to the PDP thing--I never turned down a request--I knew that computers were soon to be a way of life especially in Academe and the Laboratories.

Bob Glorioso, I and professor Taylor Booth spent the weekend once at the University of Connecticut listening to a PDP-8 try to make the sound of the letter "P"

We have come such a long way in the past 50 years in computers and related technology.

I did Pascal with the Open University.

Like this you mean:)
Pascal Program.

program Hello;
begin
writeln ('Hello, world.')
end.

C program.

#include<stdio.h>
main()
{
printf("Hello World");
}

Forth program:)

: HELLO ."Hello World " ;

Forth was first exposed to other programmers in the early 1970s, starting with Elizabeth Rather at the US National Radio Astronomy Observatory.

To get back on topic.
Quantum computers are nescessary to use when communicate over large distances.
Anybody know status today?
I know MIT have one but so far they don't get reliable results.

I did Pascal with the Open University.

I'm so sorry to hear this. Because of that you may never understand a OOP language.

---

Just a thought .

If a particle can be in 2 different places at the same time UNTIL you look at it then could that be a problem with Quantum computers as they don't seem to be reliable or is it that they are reliable , but the results when you look at them may be wrong yet 5 mins later you look and it's right .

As they should be able to compute all the results even the wrong ones but when you look at them it's like what happens to a particle sometimes it's there and other times it's somewhere else .???

---

My first was 8086 ASM and then BASIC. After that pascal and c. Then unix (1987), ADA, c++, MarkIII, fortran, dbVista, a Sybase 3-tier tool (Can not remember its name even though I did it for ten yrars), Java (2000), then again some C, C++, and now some CUDA/OpenCL as a hobby.

---
I'm a Qubit.

---

To overcome Heisenbergs:
"You can't always get what you want / but if you try sometimes you just might find / you get what you need." -- Rolling Stones

I don't think there ie even one real quantum computer today. D-Wave has sold a couple of them but they are strongly discussed and objected.Also, the very foundations of quantum mechanics are being discussed, especially the Copenhagen Interpretation and experiments are being done to test it. I've read about this in a "Nature" article but of course I cannot link it.
Tullio

---

I don't think there ie even one real quantum computer today. D-Wave has sold a couple of them but they are strongly discussed and objected.Also, the very foundations of quantum mechanics are being discussed, especially the Copenhagen Interpretation and experiments are being done to test it. I've read about this in a "Nature" article but of course I cannot link it.
Tullio

D-wave seems to be a dead end to me.
However Seth Lloyd at MIT has one. Sort of:)
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/tech/quantum-computing.html
Latest quantum computing news from MIT.
http://newsoffice.mit.edu/topic/quantum-computing


You can’t get entangled without a wormhole and tunneling to the fifth dimension:)
http://newsoffice.mit.edu/2013/you-cant-get-entangled-without-a-wormhole-1205

Though I think that we have commented before on Quantum Computing, let me reiterate some thoughts.

The word Quantum is applied to more than one phenomenon in Physics. It is easy to understand that energy from a heated body (atom or Black Body) comes only in discrete amounts (or quanta) as the electron moves from one allowable orbit (energy level) to another. Of course you must accept the Copenhagen interpretation of the atom which in this one case seems to: make sense, be easy to understand and is correct.

As for quantum computing however I have not seen a diagram of a quantum Logic circuit nor an explanation of its operation and why it is faster than modern processor chips. The same goes for computing architecture and the programming to exploit the hardware architecture. These may exist; but for an intelligent discussion, they should be put forward and explained in terms a computer-savvy person could understand.

The fact that you get QUBITs doesn't excite me since you have to know which state is the correct state.

It is easy to understand that energy from a heated body (atom or Black Body) comes only in discrete amounts (or quanta) as the electron moves from one allowable orbit (energy level) to another. Of course you must accept the Copenhagen interpretation of the atom which in this one case seems to: make sense, be easy to understand and is correct.

What? Richard Feynman said once in a lecture that "If you Think you understand quantum mechanics then you are wrong"
He had a very intense discussion with Niels Bhor when he presented his feynman diagrams.
Niels said "What the f**k. Are you telling us that you can discribe QM like that?. It's impossible"

As for quantum computing however I have not seen a diagram of a quantum Logic circuit nor an explanation of its operation and why it is faster than modern processor chips.

There is a big reason why quantum computers are appealing to scientists.
They can factorize numbers more than million times faster than computers today.
Perhaps even in a fraction of a second.

D-Wave used to run a BOINC project called AQUA@home, where AQUA stood for Adiabatic QUantum Algorithm. They propose a mechanism by which a system searches for a minimum energy state and they do it using superconducting relays like Josephson junctions. So they don't have any circuit diagrams, and their computers look like analog computers. But both Google and NASA seem to believe in this approach.
Tullio

---

I don't think there ie even one real quantum computer today. D-Wave has sold a couple of them but they are strongly discussed and objected.Also, the very foundations of quantum mechanics are being discussed, especially the Copenhagen Interpretation and experiments are being done to test it. I've read about this in a "Nature" article but of course I cannot link it.
Tullio

I am very suspicious of the D-Wave as some very clever sales beyond reality...

They are very clever for aiming for utilizing what they call "quantum annealing".

However...

The complete lack of any astounding results from their present devices stongly suggests that they are using multiple quantum devices in an isolated and non-coherent/entangled way.


In brief, they merely have a very expensive super-cool conventional computer.

All the rest is some fantastic Canadian Marketing.


Keep searchin',
Martin

---

See new freedom: Mageia Linux
Take a look for yourself: Linux Format
The Future is what We all make IT (GPLv3)

Roll a marble on the floor and it will find it's minimum energy point

Quantum computing is still a target. But quantum cryptography is used today to transmit cryptographic keys in a secure way.
Tullio

---