A short informative video, in German with English subtitles, on the interesting machine from Austria and from the late 50s. Built using transistors donated by Philips originally intended for hearing aids.
The Mailüfterl was the first fully transistorized computer on continental Europe. It was built at the Technical University of Vienna (Austria) from 1956 to 1958 by Dr. Heinz Zemanek and his team. The machine was very reliable and was in operation until about 1966 :-).
The Mailüfterl was a fully transistorized, serial, decimal-and-binary drum computer with 50 words of immediate-access core storage. The 3,000-rpm drum stored 10,000 48-bit words. Instructions were of the one-address type, fully utilizing a whole word, as they included references to the core store, condition on execution, and indication of how the address is to be modified or interpreted, etc. Addition took 0.8 ms. Multiplication and division were effected by subroutines, multiplication taking 26 ms.
There’s a nice image of the machine here
via
where we learn an interesting link to Konrad Zuse, from an answer by Raffzahn (a prolific contributor there)
Zuse did finance part of Mailüfterl development and provided detailed Z22 information. Intent was to use knowledge gained to develop a transistorised Z22 follow up, the 1961 Z23. But Mailüfterl is as much a PERM follow up as it is Z22 related.
Notably, the Mailüfterl was conceptualized before the TX-0, but the latter beat it in time to completed construction for the first fully-transistorized computer.
Zemaneks handicapt was that the the Mailüfterl was a “grey project” without any budget and he was relying on donations for parts. Now, bistable elements as used in computers can be done two ways, regarding their transition phase: either, you focus on a wider and slow range of transitional behavior, as preferable for amplification, or you want to have a short transtion towards a saturated state, as preferable for switching. The only transistors that were available in numbers (about 3,000) at the time were transistors designed for hearing aids, which were donated by Philips. As suitable for the dedicated application these were not so ideal for switching.
Hence, the name, Mailüferl (breeze of May), as in, “others may have “Whirlwinds” and “Typhoons”, this will be more like a Viennese breeze of May.” (Heinz Zamenek at the first German conference on calculating machines, where he introduced the concept for the computer. This stuck.)
See also this page at the Vienna Technical University (TU Wien / Informatics):
(PS: I once did a post on the Mailüfterl on Google+, including some of my own photos. If there’s interest, I could look if I can still find any of this.)
I’d be interested to see those photos again! I have some patchy records of G+ activity but I doubt if I have any albums by others.
You posted on 2016-06-30
Das Mailüfterl – A Vistit to the Vienna Technical Museum
The Mailüfterl (or, formal, Binär dezimaler Volltransistor-Rechenautomat – binary-decimal fully transistorized computing automaton) was one of the first fully transistorized computers and the first in continental Europe, built in Vienna by Heinz Zemanek et al. at TU Wien (technical university of Vienna) in 1956-1958. It was Austria’s first computer, a 48 bits machine designed to work in both decimal and binary systems. While it’s a quite remarkable…
I notice you mention in a comment on one photo that the dial markings show that this machine used excess-3 for decimal, and you link to this image on wikimedia.
They are, indeed, both decimal (outer scale) and binary (inner ring). Moreover, decimal seems to be implement in excess-3-encoding. (I.e., dec 0 = hex 3, dec 1 = hex 4, etc.)
I notice you posted about ALGOL on this machine (I’ve updated the link):
There’s even Mailüfterl ALGOL for Vienna’s pioneering fully transistorized computer (which was bought by IBM)!
Edit: from your link, I see the very satisfactory note
After building the hardware, the team went to programming from 1958 to 1961. On 27 May 1958, the Mailüfterl calculated the prime number 5,073,548,261 in 66 minutes. In 1959 a music-theoretical program was developed for the twelve-tone composer Hanns Jelinek —after 60 hours of computing, Mailüfterl produced a result.
Also, mind the chess board seen on those photos. It’s wired for machine input and stands as a testament to Zemanek’s conviction that computers are for more than computing, i.e. “just” solving numeric problems. It should be also mentioned how thin this machine is, even when enshrined behind glass panels as it is today. It’s probably thinner than a regular shelve.
It should be also mentioned that Heinz Zemanek went on to found the Vienna IBM Lab, where much of the theoretical work for the foundations of PL/I was done. (Compare the Vienna Definition Language, VDL.) If you think that there’s too much Wittgenstein in PL/I, he is probably the one to blame.
