DOCSLIB.ORG

Computer Conservation Society

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
Computer Conservation Society Issue Number 80 Winter 2017/8 Computer Conservation Society Aims and objectives The Computer Conservation Society (CCS) is a co-operative venture between BCS, The Chartered Institute for IT; the Science Museum of London; and the Museum of Science and Industry (MSI) in Manchester. The CCS was constituted in September 1989 as a Specialist Group of the British Computer Society. It is thus covered by the Royal Charter and charitable status of BCS. The aims of the CCS are: To promote the conservation of historic computers and to identify existing computers which may need to be archived in the future, To develop awareness of the importance of historic computers, To develop expertise in the conservation and restoration of historic computers, To represent the interests of Computer Conservation Society members with other bodies, To promote the study of historic computers, their use and the history of the computer industry, To publish information of relevance to these objectives for the information of Computer Conservation Society members and the wider public. Membership is open to anyone interested in computer conservation and the history of computing. The CCS is funded and supported by voluntary subscriptions from members, a grant from BCS, fees from corporate membership, donations and by the free use of the facilities of our founding museums. Some charges may be made for publications and attendance at seminars and conferences. There are a number of active projects on specific computer restorations and early computer technologies and software. Younger people are especially encouraged to take part in order to achieve skills transfer. The CCS also enjoys a close relationship with the National Museum of Computing. Resurrection The Journal of the Computer Conservation Society ISSN 0958-7403 Number 80 Winter 2017/8 Contents Society Activity 2 News Round-Up 10 CCS Chair’s Annual Report 11 David Morriss GPM for a Challenge 13 P.A. Cherepanov Smoke and Mirrors — The ICL 2905 19 Dik Leatherdale A Life In Computing 22 Alan Freke Obituary : Geoff Tootill 24 Martin Campbell-Kelly Out of Oslo 26 Peter Short Yet Another Differential Analyser 32 From The Meccano Magazine — January 1951 Letter to the Editor 35 Mike Robinson 50 Years Ago ….From the Pages of Computer Weekly 34 Brian Aldous Forthcoming Events 39 Society Activity EDSAC Replica — Andrew Herbert In recent months we have been beset by valve and mechanical wiring failures tripping out the machine. Frustratingly several days have been lost to fault finding rather than making forward progress. Some adjustments have been made to the sensitivity of the power supply safety circuits and this has improved matters. The main focus for commissioning is Main Control and getting the order fetch and decode cycle working. We have finally taken delivery of the last batch of metalwork for the remaining chassis from our supplier — a change of ownership has led to significant delays but we now have all we need to finish the machine. With the delivery of the metalwork for the long delay pizza boxes Peter Linington and colleagues are starting on the assembly of the main store delay lines. Analytical Engine — Doron Swade Work has continued steadily going through Babbage’s manuscript Sketchbooks (his working notebooks) and building up the cross reference database. As reported previously the volume of material is substantial and its organisation is not conducive to systematic study: it not indexed or themed by topic, nor is it rigorously chronological. Time and time again Babbage revisits the same or related topics over a period of decades, and these entries, many of which are cryptic, are dispersed through the 25 volumes comprising some 7-8,000 manuscript sheets. The cross- referenced database is being developed by Tim Robinson as a key research tool to manage this distributed content. The focus for the last six months has been on the volumes most relevant to the Analytical Engine design started in 1834. Happily this main sequence of books is, for the most part, in chronological order. We have just completed Volume 5 which covers 1841–1844, and includes the most intense period of work by Babbage on Plan 28, the most advanced design for the Analytical Engine. There are notable gaps corresponding to periods when Babbage was travelling. There is a separate “Travelling Scribbling Book”, which has not yet been studied in detail, and we know of a significant body of manuscript material in the Buxton archive at Oxford which was written while Babbage was travelling in Europe in the early 1840s. The intention is to fill these gaps in due course. 2 Resurrection Winter 2017/8 While focussing on building the database, we have resisted the temptation analyse the material as we go as such analysis will be substantially assisted once the full corpus is in searchable form. Having said which, there are already new findings. A landmark drawing is Plan 25, dated 5 August 1840, which depicts the “Great Engine”. This Plan provides the most complete system overview of the state of play at that time and is the most well-known of Babbage’s technical drawings. The version of the machine in Plan 25 is that Babbage presented in Turin in 1840 and on which Menabrea based his published description, which in turn prompted Ada Lovelace’s famous Notes. The new finding is that there is no evidence of “user level” conditional control in this defining version of the design, this despite provision for sophisticated multi-way conditional branching at the “microcode” level. Given that the 1840 version was incapable of user- programmable conditional branching, the machine described in Plan 25 should be regarded technically as a calculator rather than a computer in the modern sense. The first evidence of user-programmable conditional branching appears in an entry dated 19th March 1842 in what Babbage called the “minor operations” — ascertaining if a variable is zero, and ascertaining if a variable is + or -. This was when Babbage was well into the design of the “Small Analytical Engine” — a reduced version described in Plans 26 and 27. Work on Plan 28 (yet another complete reset) started two months later, but these “minor operations”, essential to making a “universal” machine, were carried over unchanged. It is yet to be established what suddenly triggered the addition of these operations. Babbage himself gives no hint of the reason in the Sketchbooks studied so far. Some 2,100 pages have so far been cross referenced, indexed, and transcribed into the database. Although this represents only about a quarter of the total manuscript material, we are much further than a quarter of the way through the process: most of the remaining volumes are more fragmentary, contain material not related to the Analytical Engine, or contain rough drafts later transferred to the drawings and/or the notations (textual content already captured). All the remaining volumes will be worked through though these are not regarded as a priority at this time. Elliott 903 — Terry Froggatt Amongst the software available for the Elliott 900-series computers is a program called ‘Workshop’. This program can be used without any knowledge of computer programming to calculate mathematical formulæ on demand. To quote the manual, “Once given mathematical formulæ, the Resurrection Winter 2017/8 3 machine writes its own programs, runs them, and provides the results without further attention. The formulæ can range in complexity from the simplest addition of a calculating machine to the intricacies of design calculations and statistical tests.” It was written in the Department of Transportation and Environmental Planning at Birmingham University, and was issued in May 1970, by what was then Marconi Elliott Computer Systems Limited at Borehamwood, complete with a manual sporting a front cover in MECSL house style. In Autumn 2016, Elliott computer enthusiast Dr. Erik Baigar of Munich purchased a “Marconi Avionics Ltd 920ME computer” off eBay, made by Inertial Navigation Division of Rochester in around 1985. After some repairs (to address decoding and to the power supply), Erik was successful in getting it working, just before the Computer Conservation Society’s recent visit to Munich (see https://tinyurl.com/yadnl9m5). The ME is a 920 variant which I’d not previously heard of, so whilst I was in Munich, we ran some tests that established that it was a reimplementation of the late 1960s Elliott 920M, using later technology but running at the original speed, and with the 8K-word core store replaced by 16K-word battery- supported CMOS expandable to 32K. (Specifically, the 920ME does not support the additional instructions of the 920C or 905 which came slightly after the 920M). Amongst the programs which I suggested Erik could demonstrate on his 920ME was Workshop. Very soon, using a program which simply tested the mathematical functions back-to-back, he’d found gross errors in the Arctan function (although it was OK for large arguments and around zero). We do not have the Workshop source code, but I was able to locate the string “ATN” in the binary file which led me to the implementation of the function and to the floating point interpreter. The error was soon obvious. Workshop was using the series x – x3/3 + x5/(3.5) – x7/(3.5.7) +... which converges nicely but is wrong, rather than the correct x – x3/3 + x5/5 – x7/7 +... which takes ages to converge for x near 1.0. Luckily the code already performed the usual rotation to avoid x near 1.0, and the bug was fixed by simply swapping two instructions (to store the current power of x before, rather than after, dividing by the current odd number, so that the odd divisors do not accumulate).
Load more

Recommended publications
  • Manchester Baby Simulator Narration
    Manchester Baby Simulator Narration By David Sharp The University of Warwick 11th January 2001 Geoff Tootill’s Highest Common Factor program, written in his notebook 19/6/48. Recent background1 Between 1996 and 1998 much research was done by the Manchester Computer Conservation Society in building an accurate replica of the ‘Baby’ (as of 21st June 1948) for its 50th anniversary. A competition was also staged for people to write programs for the ‘Baby’, the winning program was run on the replica on the 21st June 1998. This rebuild of the replica raised the profile of the Baby and also caused a lot of research into details of the machine that might otherwise have been lost to history. Historical accuracy The display presented by the simulator is a stylized version of the original June 1948 Baby. I have made the interface as much like the original as is possible using Java’s GUI capability. Great pains have been taken to provide an accurate rendition of the Baby’s controls and idiosyncrasies. As well as this original interface, I have borrowed from the “player” notion of Martin Campbell-Kelly’s EDSAC simulator (Raul and Hashagen, p. 400) in providing an alternative modern day interface for loading and running the ‘Baby’. The similarities between the original machine and the simulator interface are shown below in Figure 1. It would be easy for someone to learn to operate the original machine from the simulator. Figure 1: The original Baby’s (above), the replica’s (above right) and the simulator’s (right) interfaces. 1 The history and widespread influence of the development of the Baby is outlined in the introduction to the user guide.
    [Show full text]
  • Manchester Baby Simulator Narration
    Manchester Baby Simulator Narration By David Sharp The University of Warwick 11th January 2001 Geoff Tootill’s Highest Common Factor program, written in his notebook 19/6/48. Recent background1 Between 1996 and 1998 much research was done by the Manchester Computer Conservation Society in building an accurate replica of the ‘Baby’ (as of 21st June 1948) for its 50th anniversary. A competition was also staged for people to write programs for the ‘Baby’, the winning program was run on the replica on the 21st June 1998. This rebuild of the replica raised the profile of the Baby and also caused a lot of research into details of the machine that might otherwise have been lost to history. Historical accuracy The display presented by the simulator is a stylized version of the original June 1948 Baby. I have made the interface as much like the original as is possible using Java’s GUI capability. Great pains have been taken to provide an accurate rendition of the Baby’s controls and idiosyncrasies. As well as this original interface, I have borrowed from the “player” notion of Martin Campbell-Kelly’s EDSAC simulator (Raul and Hashagen, p. 400) in providing an alternative modern day interface for loading and running the ‘Baby’. The similarities between the original machine and the simulator interface are shown below in Figure 1. It would be easy for someone to learn to operate the original machine from the simulator. Figure 1: The original Baby’s (above), the replica’s (above right) and the simulator’s (right) interfaces. 1 The history and widespread influence of the development of the Baby is outlined in the introduction to the user guide.
    [Show full text]
  • De-Mythologising the Early History of Modern British Computing. David Anderson
    Contested Histories: De-Mythologising the Early History of Modern British Computing. David Anderson To cite this version: David Anderson. Contested Histories: De-Mythologising the Early History of Modern British Com- puting.. IFIP WG 9.7 International Conference on History of Computing (HC) / Held as Part of World Computer Congress (WCC), Sep 2010, Brisbane, Australia. pp.58-67, 10.1007/978-3-642-15199-6_7. hal-01059593 HAL Id: hal-01059593 https://hal.inria.fr/hal-01059593 Submitted on 1 Sep 2014 HAL is a multi-disciplinary open access L’archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, est archive for the deposit and dissemination of sci- destinée au dépôt et à la diffusion de documents entific research documents, whether they are pub- scientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non, lished or not. The documents may come from émanant des établissements d’enseignement et de teaching and research institutions in France or recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires abroad, or from public or private research centers. publics ou privés. Distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution| 4.0 International License Contested Histories: De-Mythologising the Early History of Modern British Computing. David Anderson University of Portsmouth, “The Newmanry”, 36-40 Middle Street, Portsmouth, Hants, United Kindom, PO5 4BT Abstract A challenge is presented to the usual account of the development of the Manchester Baby which focuses on the contribution made to the project by the topologist M.H.A. (Max) Newman and other members of the Dept. of Mathematics. Based on an extensive re-examination of the primary source material, it is suggested that a very much more significant role was played by mathematicians than is allowed for in the dominant discourse.
    [Show full text]
  • ALAN TURING: and the TUTORIAL MANCHESTER MARK I Program the Post-War Machine Used for Early Computer Music, JULIET KEMP Chess and Proto-Artificial Intelligence
    CODING MANCHESTER MARK I ALAN TURING: AND THE TUTORIAL MANCHESTER MARK I Program the post-war machine used for early computer music, JULIET KEMP chess and proto-artificial intelligence. lan Turing’s work at GCHQ with Colossus WHY DO THIS? during WWII is well-known, as of course is the • Take a trip back to the Turing Test, but those were far from his only 1940s A involvements with early computing developments. In • Search for large prime numbers (very slowly) the late 1940s he was working on designing a • Use the logic that first stored-program computer (Colossus couldn’t store inspired the Turing Test programs, and in any case was still very secret), and in 1948 moved to Manchester where the Manchester Baby and Manchester Mark I were being developed. The Manchester Baby (aka the Manchester Small Scale Experimental Machine) wasn’t a full general- purpose computer, but a small-scale test of Williams tube memory (cathode ray memory, using the charge well created by drawing a dot or dash on the tube). However, it is considered to be the world’s first stored-program computer, running its first program on 21 June 1948, when it found the highest proper divisor of 2^18 (262,144), and took 52 minutes to run. Only two more programs were written for it: an amended One of Turing’s projects while working on the Mark I was version of this, and a program written by Turing to to write code to investigate the Riemann hypothesis, carry out long division. which has to do with the distribution of prime numbers.
    [Show full text]
  • Lean, Tom. "Electronic Brains." Electronic Dreams: How 1980S Britain Learned to Love the Computer. London: Bloomsbury Sigma, 2016
    Lean, Tom. "Electronic Brains." Electronic Dreams: How 1980s Britain Learned to Love the Computer. London: Bloomsbury Sigma, 2016. 9–33. Bloomsbury Collections. Web. 28 Sep. 2021. <http://dx.doi.org/10.5040/9781472936653.0004>. Downloaded from Bloomsbury Collections, www.bloomsburycollections.com, 28 September 2021, 05:11 UTC. Copyright © Tom Lean 2016. You may share this work for non-commercial purposes only, provided you give attribution to the copyright holder and the publisher, and provide a link to the Creative Commons licence. CHAPTER ONE Electronic Brains n June 1948, in a drab laboratory in the Gothic surroundings Iof the Victoria University of Manchester, a small team of electronics engineers observed the success of an experiment they had been working on for months. The object of their interest was an untidy mass of electronics that fi lled the tall, bookcase-like racks lining the walls of the room. At the centre of this bird ’ s nest of cables, radio valves and other components glowed a small, round display screen that allowed a glimpse into the machine ’ s electronic memory, a novel device sitting off to one side hidden in a metal box. This hotchpotch assembly of electronic bits and bobs was offi cially known as the Small- Scale Experimental Machine (SSEM), but has become better known as the ‘ Manchester Baby ’ . It was the world ’ s fi rst electronic stored program computer, a computer that used an electronic memory to store data and the program that instructed it what to do, the basic architecture still used by most computers today. Baby ’ s creators, Tom Kilburn, Geoff rey Tootill and Freddy Williams, were all electronics engineers seasoned by years of work developing wartime radar systems under great secrecy and urgency.
    [Show full text]
  • The Baby Machine Os Matemáticos E Os Computadores
    CORE Metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk Provided by Universidade do Minho: RepositoriUM 1 The Baby Machine os matemáticos e os computadores © José Maria Fernandes de Almeida Tom Kilburn nasceu a 11 de Agosto de 1921 em Earlsheaton, um subúrbio de Dewsbury no Yorkshire em Inglaterra. Em 1940 obteve o grau de BA e em 1942 o de MA em Ciências Matemáticas na Universidade de Cambridge, UK. Em 1942 foi incorporado como "scientific officer" no "Telecommunications Research Establishment - TRE -" em Malvern , UK. Ao chegar a Malvern, em Setembro de 1942 Tom Kilburn disse, naturalmente, que gostaria de ser incorporado no Grupo da Matemática. A resposta foi seca: "o Grupo está cheio, apresente-se a Freddie Williams no pavilhão de cricket". Freddie Williams, mais velho 10 anos que Tom Kilburn, era BSc (1933) em Engenharia pela Universidade de Manchester, DPhil (1936) pela Universidade de Oxford e DSc (1939) pela Universidade de Manchester. A área de investigação de Freddie Williams era a electrónica e desenvolvia, em Malvern, um projecto para explorar a possibilidade de memorizar dados em CRT1 (Cathode Ray Tube) que equipavam o RADAR (RAdio Detection And Ranging). Quando Tom Kilburn se apresentou a Freddie Williams, que esperava um engenheiro electrotécnico para reforçar a sua equipa, este perguntou-lhe: "Então você o que é ?" ao que Tom respondeu: "Sou matemático por Cambridge". O comentário imediato de Freddie foi: "Oh meu Deus!" e, após uma pausa, continuou: "não faz mal vai aprender depressa a ser engenheiro". Ao longo de quatro anos Tom trabalhou na equipa, mas passados seis meses já se considerava um engenheiro electrotécnico muito competente.
    [Show full text]
  • TURING and the PRIMES Alan Turing's Exploits in Code Breaking, Philosophy, Artificial Intelligence and the Founda- Tions of Co
    TURING AND THE PRIMES ANDREW R. BOOKER Alan Turing's exploits in code breaking, philosophy, artificial intelligence and the founda- tions of computer science are by now well known to many. Less well known is that Turing was also interested in number theory, in particular the distribution of prime numbers and the Riemann Hypothesis. These interests culminated in two programs that he implemented on the Manchester Mark 1, the first stored-program digital computer, during its 18 months of operation in 1949{50. Turing's efforts in this area were modest,1 and one should be careful not to overstate their influence. However, one cannot help but see in these investigations the beginning of the field of computational number theory, bearing a close resemblance to active problems in the field today, despite a gap of 60 years. We can also perceive, in hind- sight, some striking connections to Turing's other areas of interests, in ways that might have seemed far fetched in his day. This chapter will attempt to explain the two problems in detail, including their early history, Turing's contributions, some of the developments since the 1950s, and speculation for the future. A bit of history Turing's plans for a computer. Soon after his involvement in the war effort ended, Turing set about plans for a general-purpose digital computer. He submitted a detailed design for the Automatic Computing Engine (ACE) to the National Physics Laboratory in early 1946. Turing's design drew on both his theoretical work \On Computable Numbers" from a decade earlier, and the practical knowledge gained during the war from working at Bletchley Park, where the Colossus machines were developed and used.
    [Show full text]
  • Tom Kilburn: a Tale of Five Computers
    Tom Kilburn: A tale of five computers One of the pre-eminent figures in the early history of computer design was Tom Kilburn. Over the course of some thirty years, he made significant contributions to the development of five important computers. Although a natural team leader possessed of a somewhat dominating personality, who inspired in those who worked closely with him great loyalty and affection, Kilburn was, on casual acquaintance, a self- contained man who chose his words with care. As F.C. Williams put it “What you must always remember is that Tom is a Yorkshireman.”1 Early Days Tom Kilburn was born on the 11th August 1921, near Dewsbury in West Yorkshire, England. His father, John William Kilburn, was a statistical clerk who rose to become a company secretary.1 Tom had a somewhat specialized education at Wheelwright Grammar School having been permitted by his headmaster to study almost nothing else from around the age of 14. It was hardly surprising therefore he emerged from school as something of a mathematical specialist. In 1940, Kilburn went up to Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, with State, Dewsbury Major, and Minor Open Scholarships. Wartime courses at Cambridge were somewhat truncated and in 1942, Kilburn graduated with First Class Honors in Part I of the Mathematical Tripos and in the preliminary examination for Part II. During the Second World War, many Cambridge mathematics dons were absent from the university serving at Bletchley Park and elsewhere. In spite of this, there remained a lively mathematical community in which Kilburn played a full part part.
    [Show full text]
  • Was the Manchester Baby Conceived at Bletchley Park?
    Was the Manchester Baby conceived at Bletchley Park? David Anderson1 School of Computing, University of Portsmouth, Portsmouth, PO1 3HE, UK This paper is based on a talk given at the Turing 2004 conference held at the University of Manchester on the 5th June 2004. It is published by the British Computer Society on http://www.bcs.org/ewics. It was submitted in December 2005; final corrections were made and references added for publication in November 2007. Preamble In what follows, I look, in a very general way, at a particularly interesting half century, in the history of computation. The central purpose will be to throw light on how computing activity at the University of Manchester developed in the immediate post-war years and, in the context of this conference, to situate Alan Turing in the Manchester landscape. One of the main methodological premises on which I will depend is that the history of technology is, at heart, the history of people. No historically-sophisticated understanding of the development of the computer is possible in the absence of an appreciation of the background, motivation and aspirations of the principal actors. The life and work of Alan Turing is the central focus of this conference but, in the Manchester context, it is also important that attention be paid to F.C. Williams, T. Kilburn and M.H.A. Newman. The Origins of Computing in Pre-war Cambridge David Hilbert's talk at the Sorbonne on the morning of the 8th August 1900 in which he proposed twenty-three "future problems", effectively set the agenda for mathematics research in the 20th century.
    [Show full text]
  • Oral History and Making the Computer Relevant Thomas Lean
    The Voice in the Machine: Oral History and Making the Computer Relevant Thomas Lean To cite this version: Thomas Lean. The Voice in the Machine: Oral History and Making the Computer Relevant. Interna- tional Conference on History of Computing (HC), Jun 2013, London, United Kingdom. pp.163-172, 10.1007/978-3-642-41650-7_16. hal-01455250 HAL Id: hal-01455250 https://hal.inria.fr/hal-01455250 Submitted on 3 Feb 2017 HAL is a multi-disciplinary open access L’archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, est archive for the deposit and dissemination of sci- destinée au dépôt et à la diffusion de documents entific research documents, whether they are pub- scientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non, lished or not. The documents may come from émanant des établissements d’enseignement et de teaching and research institutions in France or recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires abroad, or from public or private research centers. publics ou privés. Distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution| 4.0 International License The Voice in the Machine: Oral History and Making the Computer Relevant Thomas Lean British Library [email protected] Abstract: From the beginning computer history has often been more about technical developments than it has been about the social history of the computer and its effects. This paper describes how a greater attention to the social context of developments, representations of technology, the importance of users, software, and other topics, has presented a number of other ways to make computer history relevant rather than concentrating on the machine itself. This paper considers computer history through the medium of oral history, using interviews collected by National Life Stories at the British Library as part of An Oral History of British Science.
    [Show full text]
  • Core Magazine May 2001
    MAY 2001 CORE 2.2 A PUBLICATION OF THE COMPUTER MUSEUM HISTORY CENTER WWW.COMPUTERHISTORY.ORG A TRIBUTE TO MUSEUM FELLOW TOM KILBURN PAGE 1 May 2001 A FISCAL YEAR OF COREA publication of The Computer Museum2.2 History Center IN THIS MISSION ISSUE CHANGE TO PRESERVE AND PRESENT FOR POSTERITY THE ARTIFACTS AND STORIES OF THE INFORMATION AGE VISION INSIDE FRONT COVER At the end of June, the Museum will end deserved rest before deciding what to Visible Storage Exhibit Area—The staff TO EXPLORE THE COMPUTING REVOLUTION AND ITS A FISCAL YEAR OF CHANGE John C Toole another fiscal year. Time has flown as do next. His dedication, expertise, and and volunteers have worked hard to give IMPACT ON THE HUMAN EXPERIENCE we’ve grown and changed in so many smiling face will be sorely missed, the middle bay a new “look and feel.” 2 ways. I hope that each of you have although I feel he will be part of our For example, if you haven’t seen the A TRIBUTE TO TOM KILBURN already become strong supporters in future in some way. We have focused new exhibit “Innovation 101,” you are in Brian Napper and Hilary Kahn every aspect of our growth, including key recruiting efforts on building a new for a treat. EXECUTIVE STAFF our annual campaign–it’s so critical to curatorial staff for the years ahead. 7 John C Toole FROM THE PHOTO COLLECTION: our operation. And there’s still time to Charlie Pfefferkorn—a great resource Collections—As word spreads, our EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR & CEO 2 CAPTURING HISTORY help us meet the financial demands of and long-time volunteer—has been collection grows, which emphasizes our Karen Mathews Chris Garcia this year’s programs! contracted to help during this transition.
    [Show full text]
  • E4. Catalogue of Historical Computer
    Version 1: 4th March 2016. Catalogue E, for box-files E1 – E4. Catalogue of historical computer documents donated by Professor D B G Edwards. Scope. These items, donated by Professor Edwards in December 2015, cover the design of computer systems within the University of Manchester, the people involved in the projects and the growth of a Department of Computer Science. A large number of photographs is included, both of equipment, of people and of buildings. The main period covered is from 1948 – 1988, with some additional material dating from 1935 and some up to 1998. Box-files E1 & E2 contain documents and manuals. Box-files E3 & E4 (catalogued from page 10 onwards below) contain photographs. Background. David Beverley George Edwards, known to colleagues as Dai, was born in Tonteg, South Wales in 1928. In 1945 he went to Manchester University to read Physics. In his third year he specialised in Electronics and came under the influence of Professor F.C. Williams. Dai graduated in Physics in July 1948. In September of that year he became a research student working under F.C. Williams in the Department of Electro-Technics on the expansion of the ‘Baby’ (SSEM) digital computer. He obtained his MSc in December 1949 and joined the University staff as an Assistant Lecturer. Dai remained a member of the academic staff all his working life, first within Electrical Engineering and then (from 1964) within the Department of Computer Science. He was promoted to Lecturer in 1954 and gained his PhD for the design and construction of MEG. In 1959 he became a Senior Lecturer, leading the engineering team for the MUSE/Atlas project.
    [Show full text]