Elliott 405: Mainframe computing 1950s-style

A small treasure trove of documents gives a taste of computing the vintage mainframe way.

History isn’t just about dates and the events that get memorialised in plaques and statues. Far more fascinating is the personal and the quotidian. A thumbprint left in an ordinary ceramic bowl is a more direct connection to the lived experiences of people the past than any number of crowns and sceptres.

And I think there’s an aspect of even recent history that we can easily overlook. In the story of how computers have evolved, for example, it’s too easy to get concerned only with the technology — and its occasional quaintness — and miss how the developments in data processing impacted lives.