• Hi all and welcome to TheWoodHaven2 brought into the 21st Century, kicking and screaming! We all have Alasdair to thank for the vast bulk of the heavy lifting to get us here, no more so than me because he's taken away a huge burden of responsibility from my shoulders and brought us to this new shiny home, with all your previous content (hopefully) still intact! Please peruse and feed back. There is still plenty to do, like changing the colour scheme, adding the banner graphic, tweaking the odd setting here and there so I have added a new thread in the 'Technical Issues, Bugs and Feature Requests' forum for you to add any issues you find, any missing settings or just anything you'd like to see added/removed from the feature set that Xenforo offers. We will get to everything over the coming weeks so please be patient, but add anything at all to the thread I mention above and we promise to get to them over the next few days/weeks/months. In the meantime, please enjoy!

Ever wonder how they did computing before computers?

My dad was trained to maintain and repair the old mechanical adding machines. When he emigrated to New Zealand he was one of very few who could repair Olivetti adding machines (he told a few stories). If he'd stayed in the trade he would no doubt have ended up working on computers, but alas, the pay wasn't good here and there wasn't enough demand...

Cheers, Vann.
 
SamQ aka Ah! Q!":1x5ucz3j said:
Peri, some of us were educated using Logarithms/Anti-Log tables and slide rules... :eusa-whistle:
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I picked up a slide rule a few months back for the first time since I left school in ‘78. I couldn’t use it. My O level result might indicate I couldn’t use it 44 years ago either
 
SamQ aka Ah! Q!":l7ohpkjq said:
Peri, some of us were educated using Logarithms/Anti-Log tables and slide rules... :eusa-whistle:
Click to expand...

Log tables were largely history when I went to school, although they were included in the orange data books they gave you in the exams. When I did my maths A-level my calculator packed up about 2 minutes into the exam. I had to figure out how to use log tables (having never used them before) in the exam so I could answer the questions. That added a little bit of extra stress!
 
SamQ aka Ah! Q!":3f2bxeqm said:
Peri, some of us were educated using Logarithms/Anti-Log tables and slide rules... :eusa-whistle:
Click to expand...

I was one of them - slide rules, log books, vernier scales etc etc. Our computer programming class involved a lot of punched cards :)

Non of that really made me think that you could use a differential gear to work out gun range though, or a spiral track in a wheel to pass information to a cam that works in 3 dimensions to work out gun elevation !
 
Fascinating videos. It all looks very rudimentary nowadays. When I was still training I was sponsored to do a DPhil maths at Oxford and the main professor who I worked with had a huge collection running into the hundreds I think of mechanical calculators, slide rules, cylinder calculators (called a Curta after the inventor, though I seem to recall a number of brands), and other calculation machines. Some of them were quite beautifully engineered. I wonder what became of them as they passed into antiquity during his lifetime really.
 
AJB Temple":15o62nz7 said:
Fascinating videos. It all looks very rudimentary nowadays. When I was still training I was sponsored to do a DPhil maths at Oxford and the main professor who I worked with had a huge collection running into the hundreds I think of mechanical calculators, slide rules, cylinder calculators (called a Curta after the inventor, though I seem to recall a number of brands), and other calculation machines. Some of them were quite beautifully engineered. I wonder what became of them as they passed into antiquity during his lifetime really.
Click to expand...

Curtas fetch lots and lots of money these days. I'd love one but would never be able to justify the expense. I've even wondered about 3D printing one, but it wouldn't be quite the same as a metal bodied one. I've got all the drawings for the original, but it would be a heck of a lot of work to machine one from scratch.
 
In the late 70s the Timberyard had a large mechanical calculator that looked a bit like a typewriter, I could never understand how they did it from just watching but they seemed to press the same 2 or 3 keys up and down lots of times then again with different keys until they told you how much was owed, it was the only one of that type I have ever come across. Any ideas what it could have been?
 
I didn't know Curta's were worth anything. It so happens that I have a few as years ago a stockbroker we were doing some consulting for or auditing or something, chucked them out from their back office as they were moving to new offices at No1 London Bridge. So I asked if I could have them just for interest rather than them being just thrown away. I shall have to dig them out.
 
AJB Temple":3bj8orhu said:
I didn't know Curta's were worth anything. It so happens that I have a few as years ago a stockbroker we were doing some consulting for or auditing or something, chucked them out from their back office as they were moving to new offices at No1 London Bridge. So I asked if I could have them just for interest rather than them being just thrown away. I shall have to dig them out.
Click to expand...

:o :mrgreen: :o :mrgreen:
 
I’d never heard of a Curta ‘till I read this. What a fascinating story about how it came about and what a fascinating instrument. Does it make a satisfying whirly clicky noise when turned?
I’d love to see one just out of curiosity.
 
Curta – popular with the cyberpunks and so. Mentioned in Gibson’s Pattern Recognition if you want a novelistic reference.

Pattern Recognition Curtas.jpg

Thought everyone knew that. (Ironic font).

If you don’t mind wading through a load of, hmmm, badly edited plotting Neal Stephenson's Crytonomicon has a lot of stuff on very early computers/cryptograhy machines. Never one to let his research go to waste is Mr Stephenson.
 

I usually see them for something in the region of £1000. I've had my eye out for one for about 10 years, but I doubt I'll ever see one for a price I could actually justify. There are a few in the computing museum in Bletchley, but locked in a glass cabinet so you can look at them but not have a go. C'est la vie.
 
Cabinetman":244o5l4y said:
In the late 70s the Timberyard had a large mechanical calculator that looked a bit like a typewriter, I could never understand how they did it from just watching but they seemed to press the same 2 or 3 keys up and down lots of times then again with different keys until they told you how much was owed, it was the only one of that type I have ever come across. Any ideas what it could have been?
Click to expand...

That would be a Gissa machine.
 
Cabinetman":2h370no6 said:
In the late 70s the Timberyard had a large mechanical calculator that looked a bit like a typewriter, I could never understand how they did it from just watching but they seemed to press the same 2 or 3 keys up and down lots of times then again with different keys until they told you how much was owed, it was the only one of that type I have ever come across. Any ideas what it could have been?
Click to expand...

Probably a comptometer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comptometer Skilled operators could operate them very quickly and would do a lot of the calculations mentally.

In the late 60's I spent a short while working out fireman's pensions, there was one manual calculator in the department with a handle you wound one way to multiply and the other way to divide, a bell would ring when you had turned it the number you had selected on the sliders on the front. inevitably you wold go past and then have to rewind until the bell rang again. As it was in demand I had to do a lot of calculations manually, after a week my pile of calculations were checked, who knew there are 52 1/3 weeks in a year? I had to do them all again!

In another job I "programmed" a tabulator using a plug board with lengths of wire to take one or more columns on an 80 column punched card to add into totals which could be printed when another group of columns changed. I was very adept at using a manual card punch which had 12 keys to punch a column at a time on the card with a combination of one, two or three keys producing any number, letter or symbol. I was much quicker and more accurate on one one of these than I am now on qwerty keyboard.
 
Never heard of these until I read a book by Peter Carey, in which such a device is used for calculations in "The Redex Challenge", a sort of car rally in Australia. Fascinating stuff.
 
I will admit to buying a wrist watch with a sliderule on the bezel while I was at school. It was quite useful in some tests and exams.
 
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