Submitted by The Zuse Z4 is considered the oldest preserved computer in the world. Manufactured in 1945 and overhauled and expanded in 1949/1950, the relay machine was in operation on loan at the ETH Zurich from 1950 to 1955. Today the huge digital computer is located in the Deutsches Museum in Munich. The operating instructions for the Z4 were lost for a long time. In 1950, ETH Zurich was the only university in continental Europe with a functioning tape-controlled computer. From the 1940s, only one other computer survived: the Csirac vacuum tube computer (1949). It is in the Melbourne Museum, Carlton, Victoria, Australia.
[…]Evelyn Boesch from the ETH Zurich University archives let me know in early March 2020 that her father René Boesch (born in 1929), who had been working under Manfred Rauscher at the Institute for Aircraft Statics and Aircraft Construction at ETH Zurich since 1956, had kept rare historical documents. Boesch’s first employment was with the Swiss Aeronautical Engineering Association, which was housed and affiliated to the above-mentioned institute. The research revealed that the documents included a user manual for the Z4 and notes on flutter calculations.
What an astonishing discovery. Stories like this make me wonder just how many rare, valuable, irreplaceable hardware, software, and documentation is rotting away in old attics, waiting to be thrown in a dumpster after someone’s death.
Great discovery. I envision a digital archive of all computers ever made, complete with schematics, operating manuals, accompanying software, for future generations to study, (or laugh at).
Unfortunately the Living Computer Museum had to shut down in Seattle due to COVID. They didn’t have a Z4, but had a lot of machines and most of them were operational. You could write BASIC on an Altair using a teletype. Paul Allen started it, more to preserve Mainframes than PCs, but they were all there.
I’ll wait for the “Zuse for Dummies” book.
Back in the old days I use to work on valve based RF CO2 lasers, I’d seen the CSIRO machine first-hand years and years ago. They were inviting people to look at it, it had been brought out of storage I think they were actually hunting for volunteers to contribute to restoration work. It’s been moved around a few times before becoming a restoration project, it has been moved to a new location called Scienceworks. I don’t think they actually fire it up anymore because it uses so much power and if it goes wrong it will be toast!
Inside these is a work of art, no auto-routing or miniaturisation back in those days, everything was manually placed, hand-wound, wire-wound, crimped and soldered by an engineer to be as near perfect as it the technology of the time allowed it to be.
For techs, it’s like opening up a classic oscilloscope!
As part of my goal to keep access to old information I’ve been going thru my computer books and scanning all the out of copyright ones that I can’t find on archive.org: http://goldenbeetle.mooo.com/ (also at https://archive.org/details/@jrincayc2796 )