Wikipedia:Featured article candidates/Manchester Small-Scale Experimental Machine

Manchester Small-Scale Experimental Machine

Nominator(s): Malleus Fatuorum

Featured article candidates/Manchester Small-Scale Experimental Machine

It is with some trepidation that I present this account of the development of the world's first stored-program computer at the University of Manchester. The machine was designed as a test-bed for an early form of computer memory and was only in existence for a few months before being further developed to become a practical computer, so some technical details are inevitably sketchy. I believe nevertheless that this article gives a comprehensive account of the SSEM's construction and the background to its development in 1948. Malleus Fatuorum 15:13, 28 February 2009 (UTC)[reply]

- ~~I'd like to withdraw this nomination, as I won't be around to deal with any issues that may arise. --Malleus Fatuorum 01:22, 10 March 2009 (UTC)~~[reply]

As an explanation, as Malleus will not be around to address any concerns raised during the nomination, the Greater Manchester WikiProject would like to take over the nomination. On behalf of the project, I believe we can deal with issues that may be raised; I know that I at least have access to some of the sources used in the article. Thank for your time, Nev1 (talk) 01:40, 10 March 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Ref formatting, dabs, and external links found up to speed.--TRU CO 16:27, 28 February 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Support, well written article on an interesting and important subject. But it would be nice to know how long this computer operated for, what happened to it and whether it had the the reliability problems of so many pre silicon computers. Also there's a reference to tape, if the sources say whether this was paper or magnetic tape it would be nice to link it appropriately (I suspect from the date it would be the former). Were Spiel Chequers 17:12, 28 February 2009 (UTC)[reply]
- Thanks for your support. The machine only existed in its completed form for a few weeks. Once it had proven the practicality of the Williams tube and the stored-program approach it quickly evolved into a prototype for the Manchester Mark 1, with bits being continually added and/or redesigned. I'll try to make that clearer in the article. With a few hunded valves there's every reason to believe that it suffered from the same problems as other valved machines, but there's no information on its reliability that I've been able to find. It has to be remembered that the machine was in constant development and it was never intended as a practical computer anyway; work on it never really finished, it just evolved into the Mark 1.
- The reference to "tape" is in relation to the Turing machine. The SSEM had no tape; I/O was done by manual switches, setting the value of each word in turn. I've added a phrase to the brief description of the Turing machine to hopefully clarify that as well. --Malleus Fatuorum 17:41, 28 February 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Comments -

~~You've mixed using the Template:Citation with the templates that start with Cite such as Template:Cite journal or Template:Cite news. They shouldn't be mixed per WP:CITE#Citation templates.~~
- Fixed. I copied one citation over from another article, but forgot to change the citation template. --Malleus Fatuorum 21:02, 1 March 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Otherwise, sources look okay, links checked out with the link checker tool. Ealdgyth - Talk 20:40, 1 March 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Malleus, it's good, but you need to watch your sentence construction and related punctuation. Many people would kill to have such an easy-to-fix issue, rather than deeper, more problematic issues; but fix it you must. It does need massaging throughout.

"This lead to the setting up of"—That's on the periodic table, is it?
" Tommy Flowers and his team from the General Post Office's (GPO) Dollis Hill Research Laboratory were approached; but eventually turned it down due to other commitments, although they did build some mercury delay lines for ACE.[9] The semicolon (unless a boundary between items in a list) is normally followed by a grammatical sentence ("he" is missing). Not thrilled with "but" then "although".
"Performing" rather than "doing", formally? (DSIR). I guess we need this density of initialism: "The Department of Scientific and Industrial Research (DSIR), who ran the NPL, pressed the TRE by assigning the highest priority to ACE in respect of all the work that TPE was doing for DSIR." Maybe.
"and that others would work with"

"Early electronic computers were generally programmed by being rewired, or via plugs and patch panels. There was no separate program stored in memory, as in a modern computer; it could take several days to reprogram ENIAC, for instance." Try:

"Early electronic computers were generally programmed through rewiring, or via plugs and patch panels; there was no separate program stored in memory, as in a modern computer, and it could take as long as several days, for example, to reprogram ENIAC."

"EDVAC was under development at the University of Pennsylvania's Moore School of Electrical Engineering, Flowers and Wilkes had visited the Moore School of Electrical Engineering and attended a presentation on EDVAC; EDSAC was being developed at the University of Cambridge Mathematical Laboratory; and Professor Max Newman had moved to the University of Manchester and hoped to set up a calculating machine laboratory based on the use of the Selectron tube memory that was under development by RCA." Try this; there's a distressing comma splice, inter alia—

"EDVAC was under development at the University of Pennsylvania's Moore School of Electrical Engineering, which Flowers and Wilkes had visited and where they had attended a presentation on EDVAC [earlier in 1946?]. EDSAC was under development at the University of Cambridge Mathematical Laboratory; and Professor Max Newman had moved to the University of Manchester and hoped to set up a calculating machine laboratory based on the use of the Selectron tube memory that was being developed by RCA." [unsure about whether their visit to Moore was a single event ("to attend a")]

Is the use of so many "develops" OK? Maybe it's reasonable as a parallelism in this bit of the text, where I can't think of an alternative. But I see lots of this word everywhere. It's not always possible to substitute, but the usual ones are "devise", "create", "research", "discover", "construct", and "reveal".

"and Williams was leaving in six weeks to take up a professorship"—"six weeks later". Tony (talk) 12:43, 12 March 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Reply

Thanks for the helpful and encouraging comments. I've addressed the specific issues you raised, and I'll go through the whole article again later. In my defence, I didn't initially want so much background material, so when it was added I didn't really pay it much attention. That'll teach me. --Malleus Fatuorum 15:43, 12 March 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Comments by Fowler&fowler

What is a "stored-program" computer? Can "stored-program" be wikilinked or briefly explained?
- I've added a link to Von Neumann architecture. --Malleus Fatuorum 20:33, 17 March 2009 (UTC)[reply]
"The machine was designed as a test-bed for the Williams tube, an early form of computer memory, not as a practical computer"
- The unpractical part comes too late and confuses the reader somewhat. How about, "The machine was, however, not designed to be a practical computer (explain more though what practical means), but rather as a test bed for ...." (I've wikilinked test bed, but you might want to clean up that page a little as well, so that a reader understands the concept in your context.)
  - I've made some changes along these lines, although I hope you'll forgive me if I decline your suggestion to clean up the testbed article. --Malleus Fatuorum 22:02, 17 March 2009 (UTC)[reply]
"It was in existence in its completed form for a just few weeks in the summer of 1948, as its success inspired its further development to become the Manchester Mark 1, ..."
- This is slightly confusing as well. Here too the effect seems to precede the cause. How about, "Since its success quickly led to the development of the world's first commercially available general purpose computer, it remained operational for just a few months in the summer of 1948." (I think it is understood that it was the finished form. Either don't mention the names of the successors or mention them in the next sentence.)
  - Hopefully I've succeeded in addressing this now. --Malleus Fatuorum 22:26, 17 March 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Last paragraph: "The SSEM had a 32-bit word length and a main store of 32 words. Three bits were used to hold the instruction code, giving a maximum of eight instructions, of which only seven were defined. Three programs were written for the SSEM, the first of which, to calculate the highest factor of 2¹⁸, consisted of 17 instructions and took 52 minutes to reach the answer after performing 3.5 million operations."
- This is too dense for a general reader. It needs to be expanded in accessible language to at least twice its length. The general reader needs to understand (a) What do these statements mean and (b) why they are significant. For example, what is involved in computing the highest factor of $2^{18}$ $2^{18}$ ? A reader might ask: "Since no factor can be higher than $2^{17}$ $2^{17}$ , why couldn't the computer simply check that 2 divides $2^{18}$ $2^{18}$ and declare the quotient to be the highest factor?" This sort of question should be anticipated in the lead.
  - Well, it is of course self-evident that $2^{18}$ is divisible by 2, as you suggest, and that its highest factor must be $2^{17}$ , but that's why the problem was chosen, because the expected answer was known in advance, and so it could easily be seen whether or not the computer actually worked. Why didn't the program simply calculate the value of $2^{17}$ and produce that as the result? Two reasons; first there was no floating point or multiplier unit, not even a binary adder, only a subtracter, so the calculation could only have been done by repeated addition simulated by subtraction. Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, the program had to run for sufficient time to exercise the Williams tubes and assess their reliability, so even if the machine had had some kind of multiplication unit the program would not have proven the machine's reliability, its primary purpose. I'm not sure how much of that needs to be said in the lead, but I'll try to clarify that the purpose of the program wasn't really to produce the answer it did but to exercise the computer. I'm reluctant to get into why the computer didn't need to have an adder in the lead though. As for the word-length and so, I think in these days of 16 and 32-bit Windows PCs most general readers have at least some understanding of what that kind of thing means, wouldn't you agree? Perhaps the size of the instruction code could be dropped, as that's maybe not quite so accessible. --Malleus Fatuorum 20:33, 17 March 2009 (UTC)[reply]

I will read the remainder of the article later today. It is the kind of article I would like to support, but my task will be made easier if the lead is more accessible to a general reader. Will be back later with more comments. Fowler&fowler «Talk» 19:50, 17 March 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for your helpful comments. I've replied in detail above, and hopefully I've succeeded in addressing your concerns. --Malleus Fatuorum 22:26, 17 March 2009 (UTC)[reply]