[An extraordinary archive of original in-house publications, manuscripts, manuals, proposed projects, offprints, photographs, artifacts, and more detailing the development and construction of computers on the West Coast from World War II into the 1980’s. Many of these original dittoed and mimeographed manuals were only produced in-house at Oregon State College, Oregon State University, and later Tektronix, reflecting the impact and efforts of computer development surrounding the installations and acquisitions of pioneering mainframes such as the ALWAC III-E, the first scientific computer in Oregon, and the first to be used in a University]. by [COMPUTERS -- ARCHIVE]. [FRY, Macon, THORENSEN, R., LONSETH, Prof. Arvid T., HARPER CORY, Bertha P., POPOVICH, M., HERZOG, James H., HOSELTON, Gary, MESECAR, Roderick, QUAM, Lynn, OGARD, Steven, DIGBY, David W., WEINGARTEN, Frederic W., et al] - 1946-1983].

[Lindenhurst, New York, NY; Washington, D.C., Los Angeles, & Mountain View, , CA; Corvallis, Beaverton & Portland, OR; Maynard, MA: Servo Corp.; National Bureau of Standards; Oregon State College, Dept. of Mathematics; ALWAC Users’ Assoc.; Fairchild Semiconductor Divs.; International Business Machines Corp.; Digital Equipment Corp.; Tektronix Measurement Systems Division, 1946-1983]. Approx. 150 items. 12mo. to 4to. [Approx. 8500 pp (separately paginated, unpaginated, unnumbered, numbered).], mimeographed, dittoed, typescript, ink & pencil manuscript. Many of the items are stapled as issued, comb-bound, others perfect bound, and letters, offprints, and reports have all been preserved in recent black cloth clamshell 3-ring binder, many of the paperback manuals are in colour-illustrated, or printed softcovers (occasional wear, some rubbing); [together with] S-3260 Semiconductor Test System, prototype circuit board with piggyback sized 16 x 7.6 in., wired into 4 foot long-piggyback cord & 9 silver gelatin snapshots, together with MS report by Hoselton on significance of artifact. This archive comprises over 150 separate individual titles, manuscripts, letters, newsletters, and artifacts documenting the development of computers, computer programming, and testing equipment following World War II from the library of Gary A. Hoselton (1938-2022). This grouping reflects the impact of Federal defense projects, and Federal spending on accelerating and adapting computer development and technologies. These original documents, scientific offprints, manuscripts, manuals, and schematics trace computer evolution through fire control computers developed during World War II for computing firing solutions; the SWAC electronic digital computer designed by computing pioneer Harry Huskey; and the tremendous impact of the introduction of the ALWAC III-E computer into Oregon State College, actively supported and recruited by Dr. Arvid Lonseth as he pushed to set up a separate computer science department at the school. These efforts spawned not only the in-house computer systems including the Galaxy and Nebula computers, but also initiated programming languages development, technological advances, and trained generations of computer programmers, designers, and engineers who fed the growing Silicon Forest in the Pacific Northwest, and Silicon Valley in California, and even such figures as Douglas Engelbart who created the first version of the computer mouse in 1968. Included here are such offprints as Macon Fry’s “Designing computing mechanisms” 1946; Thorensen’s “Design features of a magnetic drum memory for the National Bureau of Standards Western Automatic Computer (SWAC) in 1952; Lonseth’s original contract with the US Army Ordnance Dept. for the ALWAC III-E computer installed in 1957, as well as archive of letters and original newsletter bulletins related to the establishment of the computer program, and the ALWAC Users’ Assoc. across the United States. The many manuals, in-house reports and publications present in the archive record the ongoing struggles of Gary Hoselton, his fellow students, and professors to develop the OSU in-house Galaxy computer system which grew out of the MANIAC III second-general electronic computer, and was one of the first to feature solid-state electronics, rather than vacuum tubes, and featured a magnetic-core memory and unnormalized significance arithmetic floating point. Also included are original reports on computer languages of PDQ-1, ALGOL, and ALCOM. A number of original reports also trace the development of the OSU sponsored Nebula computer system, which was a medium-speed serial digital computer using glass delay lines circulating at 22 MC as memory. It was purposely designed to be easily modified and rebuilt as programming and technology advanced, and intended for scientific applications and required very high speed search functions. Of particular interest is the original surviving prototype artifact from the S-3260 Semiconductor Test System which facilitated the reincarnation of Tektronix Laboratories in the early to mid-1970’s and influenced the Silicon Forest and company spinoff startups throughout the Pacific Northwest and the West Coast. In 1970, the PDP-11 computer was beginning to dominate the minicomputer market, and there was increasing need for semiconductor testing systems which were much faster than those on the market. Al Zimmerman who was the Systems Engineering manager, and his team including Jane Friedlander, Ken Jacobs, Chuck Edgar, Davie Coreson, Stan Griffith, Fred Kawabata, Gene Kaufman and Hoselton developed the product from 1970-1974. This was designed according to Hoselton as a “large system for testing integrated circuit wafers. . . controlled by the newly available PDP-11 computer, transferred data on and off the device-under-test 64 pins wide at 20 MHz rate, the most capable test system in the world at the time.” When Hoselton checked originally with Digital Equipment Corp. engineering who produced the PDP-11 if there were “any ‘I gotcha’s’ when transferring data to a PDP-11 at the maximum Direct Memory Access rate, they said that no one had ever done that, and no one in the world had that much data to move that fast, and to let them know how it worked out it. It worked fine.” The PDP-11 helped usher in the era of UNIX operating system, C programming language, and influenced the next generations of computer architecture, with over 600,000 selling over its’ lifetime, especially with an original cost of $ 20,000. After graduating Oregon State University, Hoselton worked on the Tektronix team which created a prototype circuit board which allowed much faster processing speeds for peripherals of the groundbreaking PDP-11 Computer. He also contributed to designing semi-conductor test systems, medical monitoring products, and later contributed to designing artificial kidney machines. Digital Electronics Corp.’s PDP-8 and PDP-11 minicomputers paved the way for computers evolving beyond immense main frames which filled rooms, and allowed computing to spread into many academic fields, research laboratories, and businesses at far lower cost. Many of the items included in this archive were either not preserved, or reproduced, as a significant number of the mimeographed and dittoed reports and manuals appear to have not survived for inclusion in institutional holdings. Detailed inventory available upon request.