Collections
Dr. Allan Bromley started collecting mechanical calculators in 1979. A year later he already had sixty pieces. Eventually he was responsible for a collection of old computers which used to be displayed in the rear foyer of the building containing the University of Sydney Computer Science Department. At home, he had a large personal collection of mechanical calculators, slide rules, etc. He was a generous donor of artefacts to museums in Australia, especially the Powerhouse Museum in Sydney.
His collection included some rare pieces. The pride of place was taken by four mechanical anti-aircraft gun predictors developed and built by the British government after world war I. These machines, weighing about half a tonne, marked the height of mechanical computation, they were first used in the spanish civil war and extensively during world war II. They performed in real-time and were capable of predicting the firing angle to explode a shell within 10 meters of a plane at anything up to 10,000 meters.
Read more about this topic: Allan Bromley (historian)
Famous quotes containing the word collections:
“Most of those who make collections of verse or epigram are like men eating cherries or oysters: they choose out the best at first, and end by eating all.”
—Sébastien-Roch Nicolas De Chamfort (1741–1794)