Index:

One of the major contributions to the development of modern calculators, computers, and many other devices in our daily lives was the transistor. The history of the transistor was recently the subject of a presentation on the PBS ScienCentral Jr. program. The web site is sponsored by the David and Lucile Packard Foundation and the American Institute for Physics. Well worth a visit!

COMPUTING MACHINES

Overviews and chronologies:

"A machine with all the answers" by James Dyson, Daily telegraph (UK):
General-purpose computer: 1948 - The need to break enemy codes in wartime was the catalyst in the creation of the commercial computer.
Gallery of Historical Machines by Mark Smotherman, Clemson University.
A Comprehensive Computer Catalog by Hans B Pufal, is an update (and hopefully with corrections) to Bruce Watson's 1992 "Big List".
GENERATIONS, The Evolution of Computers, an exhibit presented by Data General Corporation, the Intel Museum, and The Computer Museum, is a physical exhibit that is touring the world but which has a virtual presence on the WWW. The linked pages contains several excellent images of 1960s computers and early PCs.
A Chronology of Events in the History of Microcomputers by Ken Polsson
Uncle Roger's Classic Computers
The history of UNIVAC 1100 series mainframes by John Walker, Fourmilab, Switzerland.
EVOLUZIONE DEL CALCOLO AUTOMATICO: DALL'ABACO AI SUPERCOMPUTER, by Alessio Boaretto (in Italian).

Specific Machines:

The F-14A Central Air Data Computer Microprocessor "a 20-bit, pipelined, parallel multi-microprocessor" by Ray M. Holt.
CSIRAC - the first computer in Australia, and perhaps in the Southern Hemisphere (does anyone want to challenge that claim?)
The 1984 Superbowl Advertisement for the introduction of the Macintosh.
The IBM 604 Electronic Calculating Punch
The University of Manchester Celebrates the Birth of the Modern Computer
The Zuse Z3 has been restored and is now at the Computer Museum History Center at Moffat Field, CA.
The Soviet BESM-6
An EXCELLENT collection of materials, including Java emulations, related to Babbage's Analytical Engine is available through the auspices of the Swiss-based Fourmilab. Constructed by John Walker, it contains many interesting links that an enthusiast will want to follow.
IBM 650, 1620, 1401, and the EAC, together with the Honeywell H-200 (last accessed 99/08/24)
"IBM Advanced Computer System -- The First Superscalar".
Picture of the original Xerox Alto machine c. 1987
A page of information about the Altair 8800.
Harry Huskey's Bendix G-15 in the Information Age Exhibit at the National Museum of American History (October 1998).
Photographs of Charles Babbage's Difference Engine Diff. Eng. and Diff. Eng.
The EDSAC is accessible through three routes:
- The 50th Anniversary of the Inauguration of EDSAC at Cambridge University is celebrated in a new set of web pages.
- Martin Campbell-Kelly's page (University of Warwick) that not only has information about EDSAC, but also gives access to a very nice EDSAC emulator for PCs and Macintoshes.
- Maurice Wilkes gave an interview on the National Public Radio show "Science Friday" on 7 May 1999. It is available as a REAL AUDIO file.
The 50th Anniversary of the unveiling of ENIAC site. Together with pictures of ENIAC ENIAC, ENIAC. The IEEE Society on Social Implications of Technology magazine entitled Technology and Society produced a special issue in December 1995 on ENIAC. The special issue of the IEEE Annals of the History of Computing was published in Spring 1996. A student report on ENIAC was produced by Kevin Richey.
A history of computing at BRL contains descriptions of several machines from the ENIAC to the Cray YMP.
Discovery of a lost factoring machine, built by a French amateur, E.-O. Carissan, around 1919.
The F-14A Central Air Data Computer Microprocessor "a 20-bit, pipelined, parallel multi-microprocessor" - The World's First Microprocessor Chip Set, Designed and Developed 1968-1970.
The Husky computer may have been the first true portable computer, if not the first lap-top.
The IBM 1401, 7070
The IBM 7094 and CTSS
The University of Manchester Celebrates the 50th Anniversary of the First Stored-Program Computer.
Howard Aiken's Mark III machine was the second to be installed at the Naval Proving Ground, Dahlgren Virginia (pdf)
The National Archive for the History of Computing at the University of Manchester (UK) has information about the Manchester Mark I machine, as well as connections to other items in their archive. A set of pages by the Computer Science department at the University of Manchester is preparing for the 50th Anniversary of the unveiling of the Mark I on 21 June 1948.
A simulator of the Small Scale Experimental Machine at Manchester by Lee Wittenberg is available through FTP.
A very good report about the Rice Computer (R1) by Adam Thornton is really worth visiting.
Supercomputers is the subject of a report by Dan Calle.
Standard Western Automatic Computer (SWAC) with Harry Huskey at the console SWAC
Picture of the original transistor Transistor
Christies of London auctioned off a piece of the original Babbage Difference Engine on October 4, 1995. It fetched over £150,000 and was purchased by the PowerHouse Museum in Sydney, Australia. To access to the description, together with several very good pictures, click here.
Totalisator History - another Australian achievement is the subject of a Web-page by Brian Conlon.
A Poster announcing the acquisition of a UNIVAC I by Sylvania -- a press release photograph from the WGBH press kit related to Video Series. The story of UNIVAC was the subject of a student report by K. Ryan Weston.
Leo Broukhis has produced a web page dedicated to the "Great Russian Mainframe", the BESM-6.
Vacuum Tube Valley is a quarterly publication with detailed articles on modern and vintage vacuum tubes, audio and Hi Fi history, early vacuum tube computers, pro-audio and theater history, musical instrument amplification technology and loudspeaker history.
Horst Zuse, son of Konrad Zuse, has created a tour of his father's computers and a multi-media show that are truly worth visiting.

Auxiliary Devices

"Memories are Made of This - the origins of computer memories and what to expect in future", a public lecture by Philip Machanick, University of the Witwatersrand, 2 September 1996.
The world's first hard disk memory storage device was IBM's 350 RAMAC Disk File (Random Access Method of Accounting and Controlling), first offered in September, 1956.

The 350 RAMAC was the first storage device with random access to large volumes of data. (Random access means that any of the data is available in a short time.) It used fifty 24-inch (61-cm) platters, holding 5 million 7-bit characters of data (roughly equivalent to 4.9 megabytes). It could be leased for $35,000 per year.
At the end of 1999, it was possible to buy a 50-gigabyte (50 billion bytes) hard disk for less than $1,600. That's more than ten thousand times as much storage as the 350 RAMAC, and the device itself is much more reliable and much faster.

More about the 350 RAMAC and other early memory devices:
- http://www.tcm.org/html/history/detail/1956-ramac.html
- http://www.disktrend.com/disk3.htm
(Source: The Learning Kingdom's Cool Fact of the Day for December 9, 1999)
For purposes of classification the ATM is considered here to be an auxiliary device since it generally communicates with a mainframe system somewhere else in the banking system. "Development of ATMs and CDs" by Retail Banking Research Ltd, Richmond, United Kingdom (last accessed 99/10/28). Note that this report suggests that the first ATM was installed by Barclay's Bank in the UK in 1967. An "infoplease.com" encyclopedia entry suggests that the first ATM was installed in 1969 by Chemical Bank at their branch in Rockville Centre, N.Y. The difference may be in the fact that the UK machine did not use a card with a magnetic stripe but instead responded to a customer's input information from a keyboard, whereas the New York machine needed an ATM card.
This paper is on-line courtesy of students at the Technical University Aachen, Germany. A vignette from the MIT "Inventor of the week" archives commemorates the invention of the mouse on December 9, 1969.
The "Mousesite" is a resource for exploring the history of human computer interaction beginning with the pioneering work of Douglas Engelbart and his colleagues at Stanford Research Institute in the 1960s.

CRYPTOGRAPHY

CRYPTO MACHINES, a web site maintained by Jerry Proc, Toronto, Canada.
"The American Bombes: NCR, Joseph Desch, and 600 WAVES", The First Reunion of the US Naval Computing Machine Laboratory, Dayton, Ohio, 14-17 September 1995, John A. N. Lee, Colin Burke, and Deborah Anderson - published in the IEEE Annals of the History of Computing, Vol. 22, No. 3, July-August, 2000.
The Enigma Machine, stolen from the Bletchley Park Museum in the UK in early April, has now been returned after the payment of a ransom of £25,000. However the three code wheels are still missing. Click on the picture for the BBC story, and here to see the video version.
The Science of Secrecy, a TV series by Channel 4, British Television - 2000 season.
Two documents written by the late Joseph Desch and Dr. Alan Turing on the construction of the US Bombes.
"Colossal code of silence broken", by Roger Highfield, Daily Telegraph (UK), 7 Sept. 2000:
After 55 years the boffins who shortened the war against Hitler can reveal more of their secrets. Roger Highfield reports.
THE most important computer upgrade in history, one that enabled the Allies to "read the mind of Adolf Hitler" before D-Day, is about to be revealed in detail after half a century of secrecy.
This month, the Government Communications Headquarters at Cheltenham (GCHQ) will release to the Public Record Office, Kew, a 500-page technical report on Colossus, the forerunner of the post-war digital computer and the first practical application of large-scale, program-controlled computing.
This article also includes several links to other related reports.
Bletchley Park, the war-time home of the codebreakers and the site of the development of the Colossus.
Codebreaking and Secret Weapons in World War II By Bill Momsen.
A story of the reconstruction of the Colossus by Tony Sale at Bletchley Park, and the competition for the "earliest" machine, is clearly heating up! Everything about the current situation at Bletchley Park and Colossus Rebuild Project is now on-line.
American Cryptogram Association has several links to cryptographic resources.
58 views of a 3-wheel Enigma.
The German Enigma encryption machine: Enigma.
An excellent on-line Applet simulator of a three-wheel engima.
About Enigma and Its Decryption by Andy Carlson.

TYPEWRITERS

Typewriters provided much of the stimulus for input/output devices for the computer, and thus I am beginning a collection of links on this topic. Your contributions would be appreciated.

The history of the keyboard
Typewriter History by Bob Moran (Last accessed 99/10/18)