The Hagley Vault

Here's something to be grateful for next time you upgrade your home office; you no longer need heavy machinery to accomplish the job.

This undated photograph from around the 1950s shows workers delivering an early computer to the Marine Trust Company building in Buffalo, New York. It comes from a partially digitized folder of 8 photographic prints documenting the delivery, which required a flatbed truck and a crane to hoist the equipment up the side of the building.

The photographs are part of Hagley Library's Tim Bergin collection of UNIVAC/ENIAC materials (Accession 2806), which are now one of our newest digital collections. In 1996, Bergin, an emeritus professor of computer science and information systems, and former curator/director of the Computer History Museum, served as historian for the Association of Computer Machinery (ACM) 50th Anniversary in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. There, he met Armand Adams (1917-), a retired electrical engineer who had been the…Read more...