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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 is at VRM Day 2022b, the second of the two in-person gatherings that ProjectVRM holds each year, always the day before the Internet Identity Workshop (IIW) commences for the next three days at the Computer History Museum in Silicon Valley. This time the workshop also included a talk and discussion led by Roger McNamee as part of the Beyond the Web Salon Series led by Doc and Joyce Searls, who (in addition to their work with ProjectVRM) are visiting scholars at the Ostrom Workshop, of Indiana University, which hosts the series. Roger's talk was carried live by Owl , RingCentral and Zoom to IU and the world. Roger's talk so energized attendees that a cabal, informally called Roger & We, was formed in the room and took more shape over the following days at IIW. Its purpose became branded ESC, for End Surveillance Capitalism.
ProjectVRM was born in 2006 as a project by Doc Searls when he became a fellow with the Berkman Klein Center at Harvard University. Its blog, wiki, and mailing list (of more than 500 members) remain kindly hosted by the BKC.
The display room of the Computer History Museum is kind of dreary. That's the IBM 7030 in front, next to the DDP-116, the Minuteman missile, and the IBM 1360 data storage device.
another photo: www.flickr.com/photos/cshym74/3564963285/
NEAC 2203, Nippon Electric Co. (NEC), Japan, 1960
Memory: 2,040 (12 dec digits) Drum
Speed: 3,300 Add/s
Cost: 27,643,000 Yen
Completed in 1960, the drum-based NEAC 2203 was one of the earliest Japanese transistorized computers, and was used for business, scientific, and engineering applications. The system included a CPU, console, paper tape reader and punch, printer and magnetic tape units. It was sold exclusively in Japan, but could process alphabetic and Japanese kana characters. Only about thirty NEACs were sold. The last one was decommissioned in 1979.
Computer History Museum
Mountain View, CA
(6995)
Computer History Museum in Mountain View California
1401 N Shoreline Blvd
Mountain View, CA
(650) 810-1010
The world's largest history museum for the preservation and presentation of artifacts and stories of the Information Age located in the heart of Silicon Valley.
Picture Taken by Michael Kappel (Me)
View the high resolution Image on my photography website
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Close up of a keyboard for a teletype. These keys are the origin for many control characters that are still part of the ASCII character set, such as carriage return and line feed. Keyboard was all UPPERCASE, with shifts for letters or numbers (figures). This was part of a batch of slides used to train air traffic controllers as recently as 1980.
Calculators, c. 1970-80s
"All desktop calculators prior to the 1960s were mechanical. By the mid-twentieth century most had keyboards and were powered either by the depression of keys or with a crank. The invention of the integrated circuit in 1971 fostered the electronic calculator revolution. By 1974, an electronic calculator costing less then $50 was more powerful than its mechanical equivalent costing $1,500 or more. As a result, manual slide rules, favored by scientists and engineers, quickly became obsolete. Today many electronic calculators are small, sophisticated programmable computers with more power than the mainframes of 40 years ago."
Computer History Museum
Mountain View, CA
(6958)
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 is my mother (center) and two of her colleagues, operating the computer.
Shown here behind camera-unfriendly glass is one of the 40 panels that made up the ENIAC, a computer designed to calculate firing tables for artillery during World War II.
The ENIAC project was significant in that its programmers were mostly women. At the time, software programming was seen as less important than hardware design and, therefore, was appropriate work for women who were already fit for other clerical jobs; this was in spite of the advanced mathematical training required of ENIAC programmers.
The ENIAC is also an example of computer history being advanced by government sponsored innovation.