Today, I briefly attended an Earthwatch conference at the Harvard
Science Center. It wasn't as good as it could have been, but what was
interesting was the IBM Automatic Sequence-Controlled Calculator,
Mark I. This was apparently used by Harvard since 1946 or so. Now,
it's in the lobby, or at least most of it. It's an electromechanical
machine, no electronic components. Very fun to look at! The plaque
said that in modern terms, it would have been 52 Hz and 1.7K RAM. It
has one constant panel (dozens of rotary switches), an enormous
array of relays, a missing multiplication module, a paper tape module
(for output), a paper tape sequencer module (input), two typewriters
(input and output), and a punched card device. It was shut off, except
for flourescent lights, but I bet it could probably run...it was
about 2 m tall and less than 1 m deep. The photos showed that it
originally had a lot of pulleys on the back for dealing with paper
tape. It is driven by a motor shaft that extends through the whole
machine, spinning at 4 rpm. This acted as a clock and drove the tape
mechanisms. Seems very easy to use, with proper instructions. I wouldn't
mind having this in a hypothetical basement. On the plaque, it says it
was used for ray tracing for lens design. Just thought someone would
like to know :)
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Received on Sat Oct 24 1998 - 13:10:02 BST