Onno Zweers
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In 1953, Shell Labs in Amsterdam was the first site in the Netherlands to use an electronic computer in a production environment. The computer was a Ferranti Mark I*, designed at Manchester University (with help from the legendary Alan Turing) and built by British company Ferranti. The Amsterdam model was called MIRACLE, for "Mokums (Amsterdam's) Industrial Research Automatic Calculator for Laboratory and Engineering", but some people nicknamed it "May It Replace All Chaotic Laboratory Experiments". My mother was one of its programmers and kept a photo album.
This was a colleague of my mother. On her desk is a mechanical calculator. Before the Miracle, the would have to do all calculations with such mechanical calculator and pen and paper. Some calculations would take two weeks; it happened that somewhere along the way an error was made and then the whole work had to be done again.
Calculator
In 1953, Shell Labs in Amsterdam was the first site in the Netherlands to use an electronic computer in a production environment. The computer was a Ferranti Mark I*, designed at Manchester University (with help from the legendary Alan Turing) and built by British company Ferranti. The Amsterdam model was called MIRACLE, for "Mokums (Amsterdam's) Industrial Research Automatic Calculator for Laboratory and Engineering", but some people nicknamed it "May It Replace All Chaotic Laboratory Experiments". My mother was one of its programmers and kept a photo album.
This was a colleague of my mother. On her desk is a mechanical calculator. Before the Miracle, the would have to do all calculations with such mechanical calculator and pen and paper. Some calculations would take two weeks; it happened that somewhere along the way an error was made and then the whole work had to be done again.