11 Nov
2007
11 Nov
'07
10:58 p.m.
Jason T wrote:
On 11/11/07, Andrew Burton <aliensrcooluk at
yahoo.co.uk> wrote:
Hmm, I thought the company who had the rights had recently (within the last
year) folded, and so the future was uncertain. Maybe that was just the UK
distributors...
Back on topic...
I recently met up with some of the folks who run the Whipple Museum of the
History of Science, based at Cambridge uni (UK), and ended up spending an age
looking through some of their computing-related artifacts. Amongst the photos
was quite a pile of ones of a Meccano differential analyser built at the
university in the '30s and credited to John Lennard-Jones (under whom Maurice
Wilkes was a researcher).
All really fascinating stuff - not only because of the fact that it was built,
but because of the material used :-)
Didn't Manchester uni also have one built from Meccano? I think I've heard of
one before built there - not sure what year it was, though.
cheers
Jules
The awesome differential engine mechanical
computer looks as if it has
been made out of (or atleast held together with) meccano. Am I right? I
played with my dads meccano set when I was a kid, but didn't really build
much.
The oracle of Wiki tells us that Meccano bought the Erector trademark
around 1990, so I guess they are the same thing now.