Request: Books/articles about history of early computing (pre 1950)

[pier4r]

And finally one of my questions gets answered, if not completely, something close enough.

The problems solved on the Eniac. Sure it is not representative of all the work done on pre 1950 computing machines, but it is something. Also some descriptions are interesting.

A Survey of Eniac Operations and Problems 1946-1952
https://apps.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/1003735.pdf
Impressive how the US military gives a lot of documents in the public domain. Every nation - in particular universities and schools - should do it, at least for the work of their students if not up to Phd theses.

In short it computed mostly firing tables, that when they try to be precise are quite complicated and time intensive for humans with mechanical desktop calculators (see http://ds-wordpress.haverford.edu/bitbyb...ng-tables/ ) .

It had an uptime around 75% , and they even compute problems to identify outliers in a distribution. Or runs on random numbers!
I believe on earlier machines they tried to solve similar problems although of smaller scale. Indeed in the bit by bit site it is mentioned that to compute one trajectory of a projectile from a gun an analog computer had to run for 30 minutes and each setup needed around two hours.

Today we get impatient after 2 minutes. I wonder the level of debug needed before trying to waste days of computations.