Request: Books/articles about history of early computing (pre 1950)

[Paul Berger (Canada)]

(09-20-2017 09:54 AM)pier4r Wrote:  Thanks ! I am taking notes

Anything about squeezing math from tabulating machines? I somewhere read that people were quite happy to have those.

Richard Feynman wrote about using tabulating machines to do math for the Manhattan Project in one of his books, but not in a lot of detail. These machines where programmed by plug boards that needed to be replugged for nearly every operation, so he first worked out a process of having several machine in a line each set up for one step in the calculation sequence, and the output cards from one step could be then just carried to the next machine to process the next step. After a while they even figured out how to wire the machines together to eliminate having to handle cards.

Paul.