7 Jun
2018
7 Jun
'18
7:05 p.m.
On 2018-06-06 10:59 PM, George Michaelson wrote:
...
My dad ... Sids group at Imperial (ICCE, Tocher) had built a machine out
of relays, cheap from the post office. I think we can probably guess
why a large number of post office relays were available cheaply in the
early 1950s. Turings group was further along the road and had more
money, so the stuff at Manchester and the NPL was going on in
parallel. A whole bunch of these early 1950s machines are written up
in [1] including Sids stuff.
For more technical details on the surprisingly modern Manchester Atlas
(and other machines), Per Brinch Hansen's "Classic Operating Systems" is
a good anthology. ( https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=360596 )
--Toby
[1] B.V. Bowden ( ed.) Faster Than Thought ( A
Symposium on Digital
Computing Machines ) Sir Isaac Pitman & Sons Ltd. 1953
https://archive.org/details/FasterThanThought