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.
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".
> 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-...