15 April 2010

A little cheesecake

Greg Ferrara posts a publicity photo, ca. 1958, of a Ramo-Wooldridge RW-300 process control computer (a product line completely unknown to me) at (the deliciously-named) If Charlie Parker Was a Gunslinger, There'd Be a Whole Lot of Dead Copycats. Ramo-Wooldridge was a predecessor company to TRW. Computer History Museum materials indicate that the RW-300 was marketed in the early 1960s as a controller for nuclear reactors. More marketing materials at bitsavers.org describe the assembly of A-to-D modules in subframes to make up an RW-300. Stout and Williams, in a 1995 paper, chronicle the pioneering work of Ramo-Wooldridge in computerized process control.

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