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Harrison
29th January 2009, 00:13
The owner of the Argentinian vintage computer group www.museotec.com.ar (http://www.museotec.com.ar/) sent me an interesting article the other day about the beginnings of computing in Argentina.

Something I knew nothing about was the fact the country's first main frame computer was built by a British company in the early 1960's. Sadly when war broke out in the country the academics trained to run the machine fled and it was left to rot and be forgotten.

I have attached the full article here in case anyone else is interested in reading it.

The first two pages are in Argentinian/Spanish and the second two are in English.

From what I can work out the Ferranti computer built for them was the Ferranti Mark 1, although Meseta is going to try and investigate this further to find out.

I found out some information about the Mark 1. You can see an image of it on the cover of the Sales Literature http://www.computer50.org/kgill/mark1/sale.html plus many more in the site's gallery.

Quite amusing reading. "An operator with a standard desk calculating machine can do about 500 multiplications of pairs of ten-digit decimal numbers in an average working day. The Ferranti machine can do about the same amount of work in two seconds. In a day it could do more arithmetic than the average man could do in many years, and will make fewer mistakes. "

Fewer mistakes? It obviously wasn't well coded then! ;) :lol: