Mexican Computers: A Brief Technical and Historical Overview
arxiv.org
arxiv.org
I was not aware about these Mexican computers. The fact that they had computers that could be programmed in LISP, not only in Assembly, is very cool.
> In contrast to Mexico[;] Brazil, Singapore, South Korea, and Taiwan invested heavily in technological development in the 1980s. Brazil's case is significant because this country has many similarities to Mexico in terms of its economic and industrial development. Unlike Mexico, Brazil had relative success in creating a computer industry capable of producing its own technology. This was partly due to the decisive support from public and private sectors to create and continue developing a national computer industry.
https://link.springer.com/journal/146/volumes-and-issues/37-...
https://forum.fiozera.com.br/t/historical-preservation-of-th...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UaDzfq42B-g
(Maybe I'll feel silly about having done this at some point, because AI translation is getting so good...)
There's an amazing amount of material about this computer available online now. Lots of manuals, interviews, images, and so on. It must have been really exciting to be involved with that project in the early 1970s. (As I understanding it, an American electrical engineer who had worked with computer architecture was a visiting professor at the Universidade de São Paulo at that time, and led the students through many of the necessary steps -- but all of the implementation and design, down to the instruction set with its Portuguese-language mnemonics, was the students' own work.)
In his lecture, he notes that ITA (Instituto Tecnológico de Aeronaútica) actually turns out to have made its own computer even earlier than USP's Patinho Feio, but there's almost no documentation of any kind about ITA's machine available, whereas USP students published various theses related to the Patinho Feio and preserved extensive documentation and even physical artifacts and software related to it. He thus calls the ITA computer the "0th Brazilian computer".
After the microprocessor, it was truly very manageable for an amateur anywhere to build a computer. A handful of chips get you there, with no requirement for elaborate PCB or routing. Wikipedia lists the Mark-8 as first published and available as kit, in 1974 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark-8 - from a chemistry grad student. So, any country is now in. No problem. And "more interesting" university or research projects shift to LISP machines, multiprocessors, coprocessors, etc, or the VLSI chips themselves. Which does not prevent countries from promoting "national microcomputers" (including OS and programming language translated in the local language). Around microprocessors what is also interesting in this second phase are the commercial and "industry" development attempts in various countries as described by Asianometry.
"Unfortunately, [...] the lack of collaboration and coordination among the various groups designing computers inMexico, and the lack of communication between industry and academia hindered the country's further development in this field."
Minor corrections: Table 1. "intepreter" -> "interpreter"; "Hasta 64" -> "up to 64"
Brazil strikes me as having a decent history of industrial policy with the government partnering with private industry.
That's why you have what I think it's a freer market in Mexico but stronger tech-heavy corporations in Brazil (eg embraer).
Nowadays only the high taxes remain (effectively a 100% tax), the current government is trying to implement new incentives to rebuild the national industry though.
Also, I feel Mexico by being under strong influence of the US has been kind of sabotaged economically, while Brazil together with neighboring countries tried to develop a local market (MercoSul).
There is another issue. Here [2] where the first computer in Brazil also arrives in 1957 and it is not included in [1]:
> 1957 - A Univac-120 arrived, the first computer in Brazil, acquired by the Government of the State of São Paulo, it was used to calculate all water consumption in the capital. It occupied the entire floor of the building where it was installed. Equipped with 4,500 valves, it performed 12,000 additions or subtractions per minute and 2,400 multiplications or divisions at the same time.
So, we need to check which of those two computers arrived earlier.
BTW, there is an article about Argentina and computers in a complex political moment [3] (as usual). It also touches the computer science field itself beyond the hardware involved.
The first computer built in Latam was in Argentina, it started in 1958 and was finished around 1962 [4].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_computing_in_South_...
[2] https://tpilmg.wixsite.com/tpilmg/en/historia-dos-computador...
[3] The First Decade of Computer Science in Argentina: https://sedici.unlp.edu.ar/bitstream/handle/10915/24033/Docu...
[4] https://mapmeld.medium.com/first-computer-by-country-81fa479...
Most other sources just mention the year.
The way it is phrased is prone to confusion but article says: "This date marks a milestone in the history of computing in Latin America, as the IBM-650 was the first electronic computer to operate on this continent, south of the Rio Grande."
"This continent" meaning North America, not Latin America (which is not a continent).
The distinction is region-dependent: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Americas#Spanish
Besides, many Mexican people will roll eyes if people say they are not from north america, complain if they are described as central americans yet embrace the idea they are part of latin america which obviously Suriname, France or Guyana aren't part of. OTOH people from europe will usually say Mexico are part of central america. Some historians would say that only one part of Mexico is part of central america (usually called Mesoamérica).
So the answer is "it's complicated" but I tend to steer towards how people living there describe themselves.
From said article:
> This paper is a translation of the original paper in Spanish “Computadoras Mexicanas: Una Breve Reseña Técnica e Histórica” by Daniel Ortiz Arroyo, Francisco Rodríguez Henríquez, Carlos A. Coello Coello
EDIT: it is actually available and they phrase it pretty much the same way: https://www.ru.tic.unam.mx/bitstream/handle/123456789/1415/a... "esta fecha marca un hito en la historia de la informática en Latinoamérica, pues la IBM-650 fue la primera computadora electrónica en operar en este continente, al sur del río Bravo."
Given the authors are mexicans and my experience with mexican people, I still believe they mean north america when they say "continente". There is a reason the concept of panamericanismo/pan-america exists to describe something that has to do with all american countries. But I agree how confusing it can be for someone living in another country where they mean continent as the whole uninterrupted piece of land inbetween the pacific and the atlantic ocean.
Why exactly would it be "astonishing?"