I got distracted yesterday, but to continue what I promised:
Everyone who knows me, knows that I am slightly obsessed with the Zuse #z23. So I was happy to see (small) parts of it at the #ComputerHistoryMuseum.
But the choice of cards is slightly confusing.
This computer is built out of discrete transistor logic, on relatively low density cards. So what happened here is, they apparently selected 2 visually interesting cards and by doing so picked cards which are analog in nature and not part of the compute logic at all!
One of the cards has 601 visible, which is the identifier of this card type, which can be looked up in the official documentation, which luckily is hosted online by multiple universities.
This tells us, that this is actually part of the storage drum (think hard disk, but the data is on the side rather than on the top surface) and it's a "single impulse amplifier".
I totally see how that happens, as a card with 4 transistors and 4 resistors isn't visually interesting to look at.
I am also very aware, that I am probably one of 10, certainly less than 100 people alive, who would notice this.
We talk about an obscure German computer from the late 1950s after all.
