Museum of Computing Machinery

The Bull Gamma 3 electronic calculator, produced by the French company Compagnie des Machines Bull, entered the market in 1953. It is a true computer, the oldest in our museum, and it represents one of the earliest commercial uses of electronic computing. By the end of the nineteenth century, the growing need to process large quantities of data had led to the invention of tabulating machines. Large organizations such as banks and government institutions used punched cards to record information, for example about population statistics or banking operations. During the first half of the twentieth century, this technology spread widely among private companies that needed efficient ways to manage large volumes of data. The machine with the transparent cover, located behind the desk on the right, is a tabulator. It could sort, count, and sum the data stored on punched cards at high speed, and it could also produce new punched cards as output. The calculator itself — whose computing unit is the second object from the left — was considered a peripheral device. It allowed more complex operations to be performed, including short algorithms, in addition to the tabulator’s standard functions. Programs were created through physical connections on panels known as plugboards. These allowed a maximum of sixty-four instructions. The processing circuits were built using thermionic valves. When the cabinets are open, you can see them inside: they look similar to small incandescent light bulbs.