Remington Rand 409-2 Computer


The Remington Rand 409-2 computer was built in about 1952 in Connecticut. It was basically an ENIAC style machine, with 40 program steps wired onto a plugboard and a constant input panel with 10 rows of rotary switches. The machine read data from and punched data to 90 column cards. It had relay-based storage for intermediate results. The accumulator was a 22 digit decimal tube counter unit.

This computer is described in the October 1953 issue of the IRE Proceedings, the predecessor to the IEEE. you can read the article here. (These are big greyscale GIFs, about 1MB each.)
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I found a module from this computer on Ebay recently. It cost me $200. Here are photos so you can see the details of this old machine. It's weird.



Page created December 24, 2004 by David Forbes