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Programmers making tape

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.

 

These programmers convert the code written on paper sheets into tape. The tape could then be read by the computer, to have the program loaded into memory.

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Uploaded on September 18, 2009
Taken circa 1953