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The Ferranti Miracle archive of Lidy
I have put the digitized archive of my mother Lidy Zweers-De Ronde, about the Ferranti Mark I* at Shell labs (Miracle), online.
www.xs4all.nl/~onnoz/miracle/extra/
My mother got the photos at her work, Shell labs in Amsterdam. They were used as press material and many photos (at the office) were taken by herself and her colleagues. The tape, hm well, she was not allowed to bring it home but I guess we should now all be grateful that she did, for the sake of computer archeology.
www.computer50.org says that one Ferranti Mark 1* went to Holland. I guess that was the one my mother worked with. My mother has studied math and was hired at Shell lab as a (human) calculator/computer. At Shell, they had to calculate chemical substances and processes. She sometimes needed two weeks for certain calculations, with pen & paper and mechanical calculator. And it would happen, that halfway such a calculation, she found out that the result did not pass a simple test like "a squared number should be positive". At a certain time her boss said: never mind that, soon we will start using the Ferranti "MIRACLE", that can do the job much faster.
My mother says they started working with the Miracle in 1953 (because she associates the Miracle with the terrible flood of february 1953) but from several newspapers I see the dates 3 & 4 february 1955 as the official press conference opening. A colleague of my mother, Lunbeck, says 1953, like my mother does. Could it be that it took them two years to build the machine?
MIRACLE was short for Mokums Industrial Research Automatic Calculator for Laboratory and Engineering (Mokum being a nickname for Amsterdam), but it was soon changed into May It Replace All Chaotic Laboratory Experiments. :-)
There was a colleague that discovered how to produce sound on the Ferranti. He programmed the national anthem (Wilhelmus), and it was used when queen Juliana and her husband got a tour. At the grand opening before that, they also played the anthem and some other tune to the press, who were very impressed. The press also found it necessary to point out that computers were not robots and most certainly could not think for themselves.
Very funny is a remark in a Shell internal newspaper:
"Het is moeilijk te voorzien wat de toekomst op dit gebied zal brengen. Het laat zich aanzien dat de toekomstige rekenmachines niet veel meer aan snelheid kunnen winnen omdat de ons door de natuur opgelegde maximum snelheid van licht en electriciteit niet overschreden kan worden."
I translate:
"It is difficult to foresee what the future in this field may bring. It is to be expected that future computing machines can't gain much speed because the maximum speed of light and electricity, imposed by nature, can't be exceeded."
My mother has taught people at Shell how to program the computer. People were not satisfied with the previous teacher, who taught only theory. Her intention was to get her students behind the computer as soon as possible, to run a very simple calculation: 3+2. This was very successful: as soon as they got that working (some of them within a week), they were all very proud and happy, and their enthusiasm did the rest.
After a few years, my mother married my father and it was custom that married women quit their job to become housewives. My mother didn't regret that: she had enough of all those numbers. She, quite exceptionally, was offered to stay at Shell a while longer, but she declined.
I once asked a friend to interview my mother and the audio is available and my brother has typed out the text, but I'm afraid it's all in Dutch. I have put the text together with almost all photos and articles; and photos and binary transcription of the only remaining tape. Here they are:
www.xs4all.nl/~onnoz/miracle/extra/
Perhaps you can run the transcription of the interview through a translator like Altavista Babelfish. Perhaps one day I'll have time to translate it.
One of the documents is a summary of the instruction set of the Ferranti Mark 1*. I assume the Miracle was a Mark 1* because of the alphabetically ordered coding.
I found www.computer50.org after Cordula Rooijendijk published a book on Dutch (and English and American) computer history. She interviewed my mother (who never realized Cordula was writing a book) and wrote about her and also a whole chapter about Alan Turing and his work during the war and his tragic ending. It was this book that inspired me to learn a little bit more about the Ferranti Mark 1.
www.uitgeverijatlas.nl/...
Onno - june 12, 2007, 15:01 - No comments
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