Web Sites Useful to Computing History

The following is a list of suggested web sites useful in the computing curriculum. These sites were given in the IEEE Annals of the History of Computing, Volume 21, Number 1, January - March 1999.

Home Page for the IEEE Annals of the History of Computing
Virginia Tech site. A starting point for a lot of stuff
Charles Babbage Institute, Center for the History of Computing at the University of Minnesota.
Computer Conservation Society, British Computer Society, and the Science Museum of London. This site is at Manchester University, UK.
The Computer Museum in Boston, Massachusetts (now part of the Boston Museum of Science)
The Virtual Museum of Computing at Oxford University, UK
University of St. Andrew's MacTutor History of Mathematics archives. St. Andrews, Scotland, UK
The American Computer Museum in Bozeman, Montana.
Calculating Machines the history of calculating
The Computer History Museum in Mountain View. California
The Old Computer Hut (UK)

Links to Web Sites of Historic Computers

This is a list of web sites dedicate to specific historical computers.

The Analytic Engine is an excellent site on Charles Babbages's Analytic Engine. The Analytic Engine was a mechanical computer that was "programmed" using punched cards. Had it been built, it would have been the size of a steam locomotive! The design was sound but the technology and financial resources weren't quite there. The Analytic Engline is not to be confused with Babbage's earlier Difference Engine which was a calculator.
Z1 Z2 Z3 Z4 :. A series of four computers constructed by Konrad Zuse in Berlin just before and during WW II. One was built in the living room of his parent's Berlin apartment! The German government was not interested in Zuse's computers.
Howard Aiken's Harvard Mk I (a.k.a. Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator) proposed in 1937, funded by IBM, completed in 1943 was built at Harvard. It was an electromechanical device built out of standard IBM parts controlled by paper tape. Later descendants were the Harvard Mk II, III, and IV.
The ENIAC was first all-electronic sequence controlled computer (there was no memory to store a program). To program it you had to "re-wire" it. But once "programmed" it was fast because it was electonic! Work on the ENIAC led to the idea of the "stored program concept" where memory is used to store both data and code.
During WWII the Code and Cipher School at Bletchley Park (UK) was the site of a top secret project whose purpose was to decrypted secret German codes, the most famous being the Enigma code. The Colossus was a secret war-time computer built to help Britian decipher the German Lorenz Cipher (somewhat like the Enigma cipher). Protected by British government secrecy, only recently have the details of the Colossus been made known. A description of the Lorenz Cipher and the rebuild project at Bletchley Park can be found at www.codesandciphers.org/uk/lorenz/fish.htm
The Atanasoff-Berry Computer: John Atanasoff at the University of Iowa with the help of Clifford Berry constructed a small special purpose computer in the late 30's. This site deals with its reconstruction 60 years after the event.
The SSEM (Small-Scale Experimental Machine) Manchester Mark I Prototype. The SSEM was the first stored program computer to execute a program, an event which occurred on June 21, 1948. The SSEM demonstrated the use of the Williams Storage Tube as a memory device and was the prototype for the larger Manchester Mark I which was marketed as the Ferranti Mark I. Tnis was the first in a long line of successful computers developed at the University of Manchester (UK) and marketed by Ferranti Ltd. There is also a reference manual that contains an extensive treatment of the SSEM instruction set.
The EDSAC, from Cambridge University (UK) was the first large-scale stored program computer to become operational (1949). Unlike the SSEM Manchester Mark I prototype which used the Williams Storage Tube, the EDSAC used mercury delay lines for main memory. This site also contains links to an EDSAC simulator!
The IAS (Institute of Advanced Study) Computer built at Princeton and completed in 1952 implemented von-Neumann's ideas for the design of a modern digital computer. It was the proto-type for many subsequence machines. Wikipedia gives more information about the IAS computer and its descendants. The ISA (Instruction Set Architecture) of the IAS computer is fairly simple.
The Whirlwind computer (MIT) which began as a aircraft simulator morphed into the first computer designed for real-time operation (as opposed to batch standard operation) Again Wikipedia. gives more information about Whirlwind.
After a fallout with the University of Penn over patent rights Presper Eckert and John Mauchly of ENIAC fame formed the Eckert-Mauchly Computer Company to market the UNIVAC (Universal Automatic Computer), making it the first commercially available computer in the United States. Their firm was purchased by Remington-Rand which was later acquired by Sperry Corporation (Sperry-Rand) which later combined with Burroughs to become UNISYS. For a while UNIVAC was synonymous with the word computer.
The.IBM 701 (1952) which was also known as the Defense Calculator was IBM's first digital computer
The IBM 7094 and CTTS Some think the IBM 7094 was the best computer ever designed. The 7094 was a 36-bit word addressable machine.
The IBM 1620 A very nice mid-sized 2nd generation IBM machine from the mid 60's. It was a decimal machine (not binary) and was character oriented. Each cell in memory was 6 bits wide. The IBM called it the CADET. The story is that it stands for "Can't Add and Doesn't Even Try" because it does addition and multiplication using table look up. Click here for a link to a Java based 1620 simulator.
The PDP-8 from Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) was the first successful "mini-computer". The PDP-8 was a 12-bit word addressable computer with only 8 opcodes! This site includes links to a PDP-8 programmers reference manual. Click here to access my own PDP-8 Home page (with a link to a WinZipped file containing a PDP-8 Emulator that runs under MS-DOS).
The BESM-6 was a Soviet mainframe computer designed in the mid 60's whose production lasted into the mid 80's. It was a 48-bit word-addressable machine used for "number-crunching". Interesting site since it contains information about Soviet computer architecture. BESM stands for "Bol'shaya (or Bystrodejstvuyushchaya) Ehlektronno-Schetnaya Mashina", that is, "Big (or High-speed) Electronic Calculating Machine". There also existed BESM-4 (with 45-bit words).