[TUHS] 1950s computers - Re: In Memorium: Alan Turing

[Toby Thain]

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
>