EurekaUK: Great discoveres coming out of Britain in the last 50 years.

An interesting list, and this item was interesting:

Section four: Discoveries for the digital age

Manchester: birth of the first working computer
Two University of Manchester scientists, Freddie Williams and Tom Kilburn, are credited with running the world’s first stored program computer.

I grew up thinking that one of ENIAC/EDSAC/EDVAC was the first stored-program computer. It turns out that ENIAC came close to being one, but didn’t. There’s more info at Wikipedia. According to Wikipedia, the Manchester “Baby” was developed in 1948, which was more than 50 years ago

Categories:

• history

SODA submits: stunning drop

Muthu announces that there were 380 submissions at SODA this year. This is a stunning drop: last year, some 450 were submitted, and the year before, 487 (although many of those were short papers). This is the lowest submission count since 2002, coinciding with a much-larger-than-normal increase in the committee size.

Categories:

• conferences
• soda