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

[pier4r]

Only recently I realized that instead of reading just little parts about the work of charles babbage, IBM and its tabulating machines, arithmometers and others, I could read actual books that goes in detail over those things.

In particular I would be interested to know what people were able to squeeze out from early computing machines.

Another point of interest is, even if the computing machine was used for the four basic operations, what were the heavy computations done with them? (I'd think logarithmic tables, firing tables for artillery units, and projects like manhattan project or design of airplanes. Still would be interesting to have a look at the formula involved and the procedure organization)

Hence the question: does someone has any suggestion were I could look for books or articles? Even better: titles? In the meanwhile I try again with google and google.scholar.