The History of Computing Auctioned at Christie's

Larry Groebe writes "The most amazing unified collection of books, papers, and similar material on the history of computing is about to go on sale at Christie's auction house. Want a signed copy of 'Rossum's Universal Robots?' Original papers on the Eniac? Alan Turning's original proof of universal computability? Letters from Charles Babbage himself? It's in there, to anyone with (a whole lot of) money. Check out the estimated price on the 1974 journal article by Vinton Cerf describing IP addressing. It's increased in value in the past 30 years...just a bit."

Comments

Re:Historical Documents Deserve A Prominent Place.

[Jason Scott]

Haven't been to the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California, have you? I reccommend seeing what they have and where they're going with it.

Turing's grave was dug by intolerance.

[TapeCutter]

The authorities hounded Turing into killing himself because everyone knows a gay geek can't be trusted. Outside of computer nerds not many people have even heard of him, let alone know what he did in WW2 or how he died.

Re:Computors

[ornil]

You should read old "Doc" Smith's SF novels. I almost died when I read a line like the following:

A Nevian computer handed his chief a sheet of metal, bearing rows of symbols.

or

"Not exactly," the computer still stared. "I was going to set up an integral. I didn't want it, either-I could swear that somebody told me to set it up."

Yep, those are people that do computations - computers.

Re:Historical Documents Deserve A Prominent Place.

[HyperCash]

I second this. Their website really could use some work though. The measuem has all sorts of neat stuff and a great staff that has a lot of knowledge about it.

--HC

Re:Historical Documents Deserve A Prominent Place.

[sconeu]

Konrad Zuse?