By: Valuable News – 2020/10/05 |
[…] Discovery – User Manual of Oldest Surviving Computer (Zuse Z4) in World. https://www.osnews.com/story/132400/discovery-user-manual-of-the-oldest-surviving-computer-in-the-wo… […]
By: jrincayc
As part of my goal to keep access to old information I've been going thru my computer books and scanning all the out of copyright ones that I can't find on archive.org: http://goldenbeetle.mooo.com/ (also at https://archive.org/details/@jrincayc2796 )
By: cpcf
Back in the old days I use to work on valve based RF CO2 lasers, I'd seen the CSIRO machine first-hand years and years ago. They were inviting people to look at it, it had been brought out of storage I think they were actually hunting for volunteers to contribute to restoration work. It's been moved around a few times before becoming a restoration project, it has been moved to a new location called Scienceworks. I don't think they actually fire it up anymore because it uses so much power and if it goes wrong it will be toast!
Inside these is a work of art, no auto-routing or miniaturisation back in those days, everything was manually placed, hand-wound, wire-wound, crimped and soldered by an engineer to be as near perfect as it the technology of the time allowed it to be.
For techs, it's like opening up a classic oscilloscope!
By: astro
I'll wait for the "Zuse for Dummies" book.
By: Iapx432
Unfortunately the Living Computer Museum had to shut down in Seattle due to COVID. They didn't have a Z4, but had a lot of machines and most of them were operational. You could write BASIC on an Altair using a teletype. Paul Allen started it, more to preserve Mainframes than PCs, but they were all there.
By: pymeh
Great discovery. I envision a digital archive of all computers ever made, complete with schematics, operating manuals, accompanying software, for future generations to study, (or laugh at).