Dutch Computer History

Introduction: the history of Minicomputers in the Netherlands - written for the evaluation committee of the Dutch Historical Computers Register by Geert Rolf, Willem van der Poel, Edo Dooijes and Gerard Alberts, September 2007 Compared with normal, big computers, minicomputers, which originated in the early 60s, were limited in size, but also in capacity. Unlike the then-standard mainframe machines, the principal environmental requirement was: connection with the outside physical world by means of sensors and actuators. The word length was small and memory capacity was relatively limited, due to the expected applications.