Raúl Rojas

Fascinating collection of papers from a 1999 conference on early computers, calculators, and tabulators, covering roughly 1925-1965. The depth and writing quality varies widely. The most in-depth is probably the ENIAC on a Chip paper, it might contain enough information to get working on a simulator. I also finally grokked how plug-board computing works. A few others contain full instruction sets. The piece giving a social-orgainization perspective on von Neumann's IAS machine also stood out.

All the usual suspects, ENIAC, ABC, the Manchester Baby, Z1-Z3, Z4, but also some I'd never heard of before, like the DEHOMAG machines and some early Japanese machines. The early Japanese machines were really interesting because of their use of parametrons, which I'd never heard of before, instead of tubes or transistors.… (more)