A great disappearing act: the electronic analogue computer

One historian of technology has called the analogue computer 'one of the great disappearing acts of the Twentieth Century'. This paper will look briefly at the origins, development and decline of the electronic analogue computer .

The first business computer: a case study in user-driven innovation

In 1949, the world's first business computer application was rolled out. The host for the application was a British catering and food-manufacturing company, which had developed and built its own computer, designed for business data processing. The author traces the endeavour's history and presents an analysis of how and why the company-J. Lyons & Co.-was in a natural position to take on the challenge, the precursor of the information revolution we see toda

The development of computer science research in the People's Republic of China 2000-2009: A bibliometric study

This paper reports a bibliometric study of the development of computer science research in the People's Republic of China in the 21st century, using data from the Web of Science, Journal Citation Reports and CORE databases. Focusing on the areas of data mining, operating systems and web design, it is shown that whilst the productivity of Chinese research has risen dramatically over the period under review, its impact is still low when compared with established scientific nations such as the USA, the UK and Japan. The publication and citation data for China are compared with corresponding data for the other three BRIC nations (Brazil, Russian and India). It is shown that China dominates the BRIC nations in terms of both publications and citations, but that Indian publications often have a greater individual impact. © The Author(s) 2012

Continuous maintenance and the future – Foundations and technological challenges

High value and long life products require continuous maintenance throughout their life cycle to achieve required performance with optimum through-life cost. This paper presents foundations and technologies required to offer the maintenance service. Component and system level degradation science, assessment and modelling along with life cycle ‘big data’ analytics are the two most important knowledge and skill base required for the continuous maintenance. Advanced computing and visualisation technologies will improve efficiency of the maintenance and reduce through-life cost of the product. Future of continuous maintenance within the Industry 4.0 context also identifies the role of IoT, standards and cyber security

A Historical Perspective on Runtime Assertion Checking in Software Development

This report presents initial results in the area of software testing and analysis produced as part of the Software Engineering Impact Project. The report describes the historical development of runtime assertion checking, including a description of the origins of and significant features associated with assertion checking mechanisms, and initial findings about current industrial use. A future report will provide a more comprehensive assessment of development practice, for which we invite readers of this report to contribute information

Setting-up early computer programs: D. H. Lehmer's ENIAC computation

A complete reconstruction of Lehmer's ENIAC set-up for computing the exponents of p modulo two is given. This program served as an early test program for the ENIAC (1946). The reconstruction illustrates the difficulties of early programmers to find a way between a man operated and a machine operated computation. These difficulties concern both the content level (the algorithm) and the formal level (the logic of sequencing operations)

Latin American perspectives to internationalize undergraduate information technology education

The computing education community expects modern curricular guidelines for information technology (IT) undergraduate degree programs by 2017. The authors of this work focus on eliciting and analyzing Latin American academic and industry perspectives on IT undergraduate education. The objective is to ensure that the IT curricular framework in the IT2017 report articulates the relationship between academic preparation and the work environment of IT graduates in light of current technological and educational trends in Latin America and elsewhere. Activities focus on soliciting and analyzing survey data collected from institutions and consortia in IT education and IT professional and educational societies in Latin America; these activities also include garnering the expertise of the authors. Findings show that IT degree programs are making progress in bridging the academic-industry gap, but more work remains

Experience on material implication computing with an electromechanical memristor emulator

Memristors are being considered as a promising emerging device able to introduce new paradigms in both data storage and computing. In this paper the authors introduce the concept of a quasi-ideal experimental device that emulates the fundamental behavior of a memristor based on an electro- mechanical organization. By using this emulator, results about the experimental implementation of an unconventional material implication-based data-path equivalent to the i-4004 are presented and experimentally demonstrated. The use of the proposed quasi-ideal device allows the evaluation of this new computing paradigm, based on the resistance domain, without incorporating the disturbance of process and cycle to cycle variabilities observed in real nowadays devices that cause a limit in yield and behavior.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version