Simon Lavington

Only 40 Pegasus computers were ever built. The machine executed about 3000 instructions per second and had 25 Kbytes of total storage. But those numbers don't do justice to a machine which was hugely influential on later computer architectures, partly because it was designed to be easy to program rather than simply being faster than its predecessors. As Bell and Newell observed, it was the earliest computer to have general registers. Simon Lavington, however, does do Pegasus justice in this accessible history of the machine, its uses, and its makers.

There's a good description of the British and international background, a complete list of all Pegasus systems sold, example programs, and descriptions of the system from an engineering, architecture, application and sales viewpoint. The book is also selectively illustrated with excellent photographs, many from the Ferranti archive. Although parts of this history will only make sense to someone with a good understanding of computer architectures, the bulk of it is accessible to any reader and describes the people and their motivations just as well as it describes the technology they created.

An excellent, compact history of an influential computer from an expert in the field.… (mehr)